Designing Efficient BPM Applications

Chapter 2. Preparing Your System

In the previous chapter, you learned to recognize the business processes that you use in your company, and how to assess those processes that would most benefit from being automated.

In the rest of the book, you will create an application for managing paid vacation, which includes several processes. This is a typical example: almost every company needs a process for managing paid vacation. This chapter introduces the application by presenting the requirements. It then explains how to install and start the software that you will use to create the application.

Example Application: Vacation Management

Helen Kelly is the HR manager for the ACME corporation, which is a small organization in the business of being an example for BPM process developers. She wants an application that employees can use to track their paid vacation allowance and request days off. The following sidebar contains her description of what she wants.

Vacation Management Application Requirements

Until now, we have managed vacation requests in email and by updating spreadsheets. It’s painful for HR and for employees, so we want a tool that will be easy for everyone to use. Something with a cool name so everyone remembers it! It’s a tool for employees, managers, and HR. I’m all three, so this is what I want:

As an employee, when I log in to the application, I want it to display the number of days I have available to book and my existing vacation requests. This is a kind of “vacation ...