Getting Started with PeopleSoft Workflow Technology

This chapter discusses:

Click to jump to parent topicPeopleSoft Workflow Technology Overview

Workflow capabilities enable you to efficiently automate the flow of information throughout your enterprise, crossing both application and functional boundaries. PeopleSoft Workflow Technology consists of a powerful set of tools that enables you to automate time-consuming business processes and deliver the right information to the right people at the right time. You can merge the activities of multiple users into flexible business processes to increase efficiency, cut costs, and keep up with rapidly changing customer and competitive challenges.

Many of the tasks that you perform throughout the day are part of larger tasks that involve several steps and several people. For example, when you order supplies, you are really initiating an approval process: someone else reviews the order and either approves or denies it. If the order is approved, a purchase order is sent to the vendor. If it is denied, notification is sent back to the person who submitted the original order. The term workflow refers to this larger process.

Using PeopleSoft Workflow Technology requires you to define, step by step, your business processes. The first step in implementing your workflow application is determining the business rules of your organization. This step involves taking fluid, subtle, and sometimes controversial practices and defining explicit rules of operation. The trick to this step is in walking a tightrope: your business rules must be specific enough to give you a solid understanding of your project goals, but not so specific that they predefine a single solution—one that might be impossible to implement, or that does not provide needed flexibility.

Click to jump to parent topicPeopleSoft Workflow Technology Implementation

This section discusses the steps required to build a workflow.

Step One: Designing a Workflow Application

Designing a workflow application can include three main steps:

  1. Analyze and document your business requirements.

  2. Diagram the process flow.

  3. Document the workflow object attributes for business processes, activities, steps, events, and email and worklist routings.

In the planning phase of your implementation, take advantage of all PeopleSoft sources of information, including the installation guides, PeopleTools documentation, and the PeopleBooks that are specific to your applications.

After clearly designing your workflow requirements, you can proceed to building the workflow.

Step Two: Build Supporting Definitions

If the applications required for your workflow do not already exist, build the definitions that you need for fields, records, pages, components, and menus.

See Building Workflow Maps.

Step Three: Create Workflow Maps

Create the workflow maps comprising the steps, activities, and business processes required for your workflow as determined in step one.

Use PeopleSoft Application Designer to create graphical maps that represent your business process. At this stage, you create maps only for the processes that are involved in the underlying application; you add PeopleSoft Workflow-specific elements to the maps when you define events and routings.

See Building Workflow Maps, Designing PeopleSoft Navigator Maps.

Step Four: Define Roles and Role Users

Define the roles and the role users, including any Query roles, required for your workflow.

To ensure that work flows to the correct person, you must determine who that person is. You can find the right person using either Query roles or user list roles.

See Defining Roles and Users.

Step Five: Define Worklist Records

Create a record definition that will be used to store all of the application-specific information for the worklist.

The worklist record determines which fields of information the system stores for each work item, including the data needed to access the target page (the search keys for the page) and any additional information that you want to display in the worklist itself. Because different worklist entries can have different target pages and display data, you need separate worklist records for the different types of entries that will appear in the worklist.

See Defining Worklist Records.

Step Six: Define the Workflow Objects

This is the step in which you define the workflow application. You enter each of the objects onto a business process definition in Application Designer as determined in step one.

You will define the events and routings that make up workflow. Events and routings are both objects on the workflow maps. To define these workflow objects, add the icons to the map, linked to the step representing the page where the triggering event occurs.

See Adding Events and Routings.

Step Seven: Define Event Triggers

Define the business rule in PeopleCode on the triggering application record definition. Workflow programs are defined on a record definition for one of the tables that the component accesses. They contain the business rules used to decide whether to trigger the business event. The PeopleCode detects when a business rule has been triggered and determines the appropriate action.

See Defining Event Triggers.

Step Eight: Test

Test your workflow, or use the workflow monitoring tools in Workflow Administrator to validate worklist routing results.

See Administering PeopleSoft Workflow.