Can or has WDX be used for BPM

I have a client who would like a BPM.

They need to be able to procure or build a BPM that is then configurable to have End-User build workflow templates and generate emails/reports/downloads/etc....

Please advise & thank you,
John

hi
What is a BPM?

Hi looked it up , Business process modeling ??

Yes it is possible. I guess. Because one could create like building bloks and then use control clone ( I believe in version 2o it is even possible to create controls ).
to let the user create versions of the building bloks. With the draw functions and drag and drop one should be able to create a programm that can conect these buildingbloks to create schema;s and stuff at run time. Then the printing and emailing etc is all easily done.

With windev this should be possible. With the web and mobile Iam not sure since I donnot work with mobile and only recently am working more with webdev.


regards
Allard

John

I think your question may be too open ended without some further information to put your situation into perspective.

Are you asked to build a BPM and Workflow Engine to enhance an existing Windev/Webdev project ?

Hi John,

BPM = Business Processs Management.

To my knowledge the answer is NO...
It doesn't come out of the box but of course you could probably write a BPM engine in WX although I would go for a more open development platform. Why? Simply because you'll find many more resources and reusables components, codebits, support fora, etc... Also if you get stuck on a WX bug you're practically on your own handed over to the assessment and judgement of PCSoft to solve it or not.

I've worked years ago on impementing BPM solutions (mostly to integrate processes and workflows with the ERP systems).

There are two main standards I have worked with and two main philosophies (Standards that do orchestration and standards that do choreography of processes). Both standards support BPMN diagrams.

1) BPEL - Business Process Execution Language (Oracle and many others):
Best for machine to machine workflow processes and management.
Because of the lack of good human workflow management BPEL as been extended for this. This standard is BPEL4People. Note that like SQL different vendors have proprietary extensions to these standards. Cehck e.g. Wikipedia on the standards.
E.g. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bpel/overview/index.html

2) XPDL - XML Process Definition Language (AgilePoint and many others):
Best for human workflow processes and management and one of my favorites since it is open and can be used to orchestrate between different workflow engines and products.
E.g.: http://agilepoint.com/

Alternatively there are also the Windows Workflow Foundation .Net features (part of the Microsoft .Net framework) but these are completely proprietary to the Microsoft ecosystem. I never worked with these...

Additonal info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Workflow_Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPDL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Process_Execution_Language

It would be great if PCsoft could implement an open (and thus by the developer extensible) XPDL modeler, editor and runtime engine into the product...

One of the main features you'll have to implement when writing a BPM engine is versioning...
What do you do with the running process flows/workflows if the model of the process changes?
In almost all implementations, running processes workflows are continued on the version of the model they started from.
To my knowledge only one product is able to merge (after automatic verification of the decision trees if it is possible) running processes/workflows based on model Vx into a running processes/workflows based on model Vy. That is AgilePoint (A .Net based BPM solution).

Just my 2 cents.

Peter H.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/18/2015 10:50AM by Peter H..

Hi John

I do not know of any available as is, although you may want to check on my website wxshowroom if anybody has advertised about one.

However, yes, it is clearly doable in windev... There is a ready made example for the drawing/schema design part in windev, and everything else is logic, so there is no specific problem in choosing this way.

Best regards

John,

The "high level" answer is "yes, of course it's possible". Has anyone done it; "...not to my knowledge". But when you dig a little deeper, as Eric says, it's a very high level & open ended question.

Peter has given a great breakdown of what's involved and the considerations...

In my experience, when I worked with Pega PRPC, I considered it as (almost) a development system in it's own right; using flow diagrams, inline Java code and OO methodologies at it's heart; like inheritance etc... to produce web based systems allowing users to control business processes such as CRM with the use of WorkBaskets & WorkLists where WorkItems are assinged to team(s) and subsequently assigned to case workers for example, and the work is subsequently taken through pre-defined stages (status') defined by the business in question and worked by the business through to completion - all this is probably what you mena by "workflow templates"?

You could always take a look at "free" (is anything truely free?) community BPM's:
[www.bonitasoft.com]
[www.intalio.com]

Pega:
[www.pega.com]

Good luck...

To all,

Thank you for the great feedback!

I appreciate you wisdom on this topic and all your other response I've read over the years.

John

I do not know of any available as is, although you may want to check on my website wxshowroom if anybody has advertised about one.

However, yes, it is clearly doable in windev... There is a ready made example for the drawing/schema design part in windev, and everything else is logic, so there is no specific problem in choosing this way.

Best regards
KBS Training