Designing Efficient BPM Applications

Preface

Every business uses business processes. These are the everyday tasks you do to obtain and keep customers, maintain a competitive edge, and stay profitable. They are also the tasks that keep the lights on, the coffee machine filled, your phones connected, your payroll run, and your bills sent. This book takes an example that is familiar to all businesses, and shows how you can automate it and turn it into a process-based application. The step-by-step approach, with hands-on examples, leads you through the creation of an online process that is easy to use. With an efficient and repeatable process, you save time and money so you can concentrate on what your business is really about.

Audience

You are a business analyst who is looking for efficiency gains for your business. You have skills in designing workflows and understanding human interactions with processes. You do not necessarily have programming skills, but you know the kind of things that a programmer can do. Where a script or program is needed, the book contains an example that you can copy.

How to Use This Book

The book is a step-by-step guide to creating a process-based application, and each chapter builds on earlier chapters. Read the chapters in order. In each chapter, follow the instructions to develop your application. 

First you will create a prototype of the application page using some dummy data. Then you will create the most frequent use flow in a process, and define the data model. After using some temporary forms to check that the basic flow is correct, you will create the real process forms, and then build the first version of the application. The next step will be to add the less frequent process flows into the application, and then connect the application to external information systems. Finally, you will build and test the complete application.

Using Code Examples

Supplemental material (code examples, sample solutions, etc.) is available for download at https://github.com/oreillymedia/Designing_Efficient_BPM_Applications.

This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, if example code is offered with this book, you may use it in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.

We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “Designing Efficient BPM Applications by Christine McKinty and Antoine Mottier (O’Reilly). Copyright 2016 Christine McKinty and Antoine Mottier, 978-1-491-92471-6.”

If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given above, feel free to contact us at [e-mail].

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Plain text

Indicates menu titles, menu options, menu buttons, and keyboard accelerators (such as Alt and Control).

Italic

Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, pathnames, filenames, and file extensions.

Constant width

Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords.

Constant width bold

Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.

Constant width italic

Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values determined by context.

Acknowledgments

Antoine would like to thank Chris, who put in tremendous effort to make this book happen. She initiated the project, defined the structure and authored large parts of the content. Most of all, she is an amazing person to work with!

There are two names on the cover of this book, but thanks are due to many other people without whom this book would never have made it to publication. The authors would like to thank:

• Mickey for encouraging us to go for it and for her help with input to the Introduction.

• Nathalie for her suggestions on how to improve the application page usability.

• Duy and Christophe for testing the application and the instructions for creating it.

• Nico T for his help with graphics.

• Nico C for his awesome review comments.

• Miguel, Charles, and all the Bonitasofters past and present who develop, test, sell, and support Bonita BPM.

• Finally, the customers, consultants, and community users who implement BPMN applications and give us feedback.

May you all continue to have fun!