Workflow Processes

Oracle Workflow manages business processes according to rules that you define. The rules, which we call a workflow process definition, include the activities that occur in the process and the relationship between those activities. An activity in a process definition can be an automated function defined by a PL/SQL stored procedure or an external function, a notification to a user or role that may optionally request a response, a business event, or a subflow that itself is made up of a more granular set of activities.

 A workflow process is initiated when an application calls a set of Oracle Workflow Engine APIs. The Workflow Engine takes over by driving the relevant work item defined by the application, through a specific workflow process definition. According to the workflow process definition, the Workflow Engine performs automated steps and invokes appropriate agents when external processing is required. The following diagram depicts a simplified workflow process definition that routes a requisition to a manager or set of managers for approval.

We refer to the whole drawing as a process or process diagram. The icons represent activities, and the arrows represent the transitions between the activities. In the above example, new items are created for the process when a user creates and submits a requisition in the appropriate application.

 This process contains several workflow activities implemented as PL/SQL stored procedures, including:

•  Select Approver—to select, according to your business rules, who should approve the requisition.
• Verify Authority—to verify that a selected approver has the spending authority to approve the requisition.

• A workflow process definition must be saved to the same database as the Workflow Engine.
• A process definition is composed of activities and the transitions between them.
• A completed application transaction or event can initiate a workflow process by raising an event or by calling a series of Workflow Engine APIs.
• The Workflow Engine locates the ‘Start’ activity in the process definition.
• The Workflow Engine drives through the process, performing all automated steps such as function activities and Raise and Send event activities, until an asynchronous activity such as a notification, Receive event activity, or blocking activity occurs.

                                        – The Workflow Engine calls the Notification System to deliver a notification message to an appropriate role. Once a user of that role completes the notification response, the Workflow Engine continues to drive through the remaining activities in the process.

                                        – If a blocking activity is encountered, the Workflow Engine waits for an external program to complete and call the appropriate Workflow Engine API before proceeding to the next activity.

                                        – If a Receive event activity is encountered, the Workflow Engine waits to receive the event from the Business Event System before proceeding to the next activity.

• The process completes when the Workflow Engine encounters an ‘End’ activity.

 Example: Order Processing

This example shows a workflow process that includes business events. The example comes from the Event System Demonstration workflow which is available with the standalone version of Oracle Workflow.

OWF Components

Oracle Workflow (OWF)

Oracle Workflow delivers a complete workflow management system that supports business process based integration. Its technology enables modeling, automation, and continuous improvement of business processes, routing information of any type according to user-defined business rules. Oracle Workflow also provides an infrastructure for the enterprise-wide communication of data related to defined business events, providing the capabilities needed to:

 • Manage enterprise business processes that may span trading partners

• Support standard and personalized business rules

• Streamline and automate transaction flows

• Manage exceptions without manual intervention

 Oracle Workflow lets you model and maintains your business processes using a graphical workflow builder. You can model and automate sophisticated business processes, defining processes that can loop, branch into parallel flows and rendezvous, decompose into sub-flows, branch on task results, time out, and more. Acting as a system integration hub, Oracle Workflow can apply business rules to control objects and route them between applications and systems. It extends the reach of business process automation throughout an enterprise and beyond, to include any email user, web user, or system, enabling people to receive, analyze, and respond to notifications needing their attention. Users can respond to a notification via any standard email system or standard Web browser.

 Workflow Components

Oracle Workflow Builder provides a graphical drag and drop process designer. You can create and evolve business processes to incorporate existing business practices between your organization and customers or suppliers, without modifying existing business processes and without changing applications code.

 The Workflow Engine, embedded in the Oracle database, implements process definitions at runtime. The Workflow Engine monitors workflow states and coordinates the routing of activities for a process. Changes in workflow state, such as the completion of workflow activities, are signaled to the engine via a PL/SQL or Java API.

 The Oracle Workflow Business Event System provides a workflow-enabled solution for your enterprise application integration requirements. The Business Event System is an application service delivered with Oracle Workflow that uses Oracle Advanced Queuing technology to communicate business events between systems. The Business Event System supports the following types of integration:

 • Message-based point-to-point system integration

• System integration messaging hubs

• Distributed applications messaging

 The Business Event System uses Oracle Advanced Queuing to propagate messages between communication points on systems, called agents, using a specified protocol. Events received from external systems are processed by an agent listener that runs on that agent’s queue.

 The Oracle Workflow Event Manager enables registration of significant business events for selected applications, including functions that generate the XML event messages. Users of those applications can register subscriptions on events that are significant to their systems, to take actions such as triggering custom code.

 Features and Usage

A completed application transaction or event can initiate a workflow process by raising a business event or by calling a series of Workflow Engine APIs. The Workflow Engine drives through the process, performing all automated steps and calling the Notification System to deliver notifications for steps that involve human intervention.

 You can review and respond to your business process notifications from one central window, known as the worklist, using a standard Web browser. This offers the flexibility to prioritize tasks and to define sort criteria, giving you the flexibility to organize your work the way you wish. For example, you can group notifications by type or subject, to avoid having to jump from one context to another. Alternatively, you can focus on time critical tasks first, sorting by priority or due date.  Oracle Workflow is fully integrated with the Oracle E-Business Suite, providing the ability to drill down to any Oracle E-Business Suite or associated URL to view or complete a transaction.

 When a business event occurs, the Workflow Event Manager executes any subscriptions registered on the event. For local events, the subscribing code can be executed synchronously, in the same database transaction as the code that raised the event, or asynchronously, deferring costly subscription processing to a later time, and thus allowing control to be returned more quickly to the calling application. Events can also be received asynchronously from external systems. Before producing the XML event message, the Event Manager minimizes processing by checking whether event information is required by subscriptions on the event.

 Additional Capabilities

The flexibility of the powerful Workflow Engine event activities enable you to model business events within workflow processes. Event activities can be used to model content-based routing, transformations, error handling, and so on. A workflow process can be started or processed by an inbound message, and can send an outbound message or raise an event to the Event Manager. XML function activities give you access to event content data within workflow processes. Workflow processes based on business events give the greatest flexibility when implementing an integration solution. However, the Business Event System can also run independently of the Workflow Engine, to enable point-to-point messaging to be utilized.

 You can perform complex transformations between different formats required for your business documents. Oracle Workflow allows you to apply a stylesheet to an XML event message. In addition, when queues are defined within the Business Event System, you specify the logic used to enqueue and dequeue messages. This logic, called a queue handler, can include transformations.

Oracle Workflow Architecture

Oracle Workflow Architecture

Oracle Workflow allows you to define business processes using a drag-and-drop designer. You can route relevant information to decision makers, automate processes, deliver electronic notifications to users in a given workflow, and monitor your processes as they are implemented. You can display any workflow diagram as a process in the Process Navigator.

Development Client
The development client is a Windows PC. This tier is used to create and modify Oracle Workflow process definitions, and to save and load flat files containing Oracle Workflow process definitions and XML definitions for Business Event System objects.

Oracle Database
The server tier is the Oracle Database that hosts the business application integrated with Oracle Workflow, the Workflow Engine, Business Event System, Notification System, and directory service. The Business Event System leverages the Advanced Queuing feature within the Oracle Database.

Application Server
The application server is the middle tier environment outside of the database. This environment includes ancillary services such as the Oracle HTTP Server as the Web server, and Oracle Workflow service components that run in the middle tier, such as agent listeners and notification mailers.

End-User Client
The end-user client is the workstation or PC that an end user uses to perform daily tasks. This client includes browser support for accessing Oracle Workflow Web pages, as well as for accessing the Oracle Workflow Manager component. Oracle Workflow Manager is available through Oracle Applications Manager (OAM) for the version of Oracle Workflow embedded in Oracle E-Business Suite, or through Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) for the standalone version of Oracle Workflow. The end-user client also includes a mail client application for reviewing and responding to notifications by e-mail.

Introduction to Oracle Workflow

 Workflow controls the sequence of events that occur in the processing of sales documents such as orders, quotes, blanket sales agreements, returns, order lines, and return lines.

Oracle Workflow manages activities, executes functions, sends notifications, maintains completed activity history, detects errors, and initiates error processes.  An Item Type is a grouping of workflow components into a high level category.  All components of a workflow process must be associated with a specific item type.  An item type can contain multiple processes.

OM Item Types:

Order Management uses the following seeded workflow item types to process headers and lines:

OM Order Header (OEOH) – All Order Header level activities and sub-processes are seeded under this WF Item type.   Header flows are started using this item type with the header ID as the Item Key.   An order flow is started when an order header is created and saved.  

OM Order Line (OEOL) – All order line level activities and sub-processes are seeded under this WF item type.   Line flows are started using this item type with the line ID as the item key.   An order line flow is started when an order line is created and saved.

OM: Generate Cost of Goods Sold Account (OECOGS) – This is the item type that encompasses all processes designed to build the COGS account when interfacing transactions from Order Management to Inventory.

 The following is an example of a generic order header workflow process belonging to the OEOH item type:

 

Figure 1a: Generic Order Header Workflow Process

Order Flow – Generic is the most commonly used header flow. This process includes activities that book and close the order header. It can be used with any line flow for any item type, with outbound lines and with return lines.

The following is an example of a generic order line workflow process belonging to the OEOL item type:

 
Figure 1b: Generic Order Line Workflow Process

The Line Flow – Generic line flow manages several item types.  It can be used for all items including assemble-to-order (ATO) items, ATO models, kits, and pick-to-order (PTO) models. This flow will not work for configured items generated from assemble-to-order models.

The following is an example of the generic Generate Default Account process belonging to the OECOGS item type:

 

 Figure 1c: Generic Generate Default Account Process

 The Generic Generate Default Account Process derives the Cost of Goods Sold account for a transaction interfaced to Inventory from Order Management/Shipping.  It comes seeded with the function Get CCID (account ID) for a line. This function will return the CCID from the Cost of Goods Sold assigned to the item on the sales order line within the shipping inventory organization.