Resuming a process, How would you design this? Options

[Pilou]

Hello,

I have got some quite complex business processes to model, and here is my first question. I was wondering how we could design this particular situation :

- Imagine a quite complex and long process.
- At anytime an external actor could send a mail which will cause this process to be interrupted causing a new process to be launched to process the mail. We cannot go further in the main process until the mail is processed.
- Once the mail is processed, we need to resume the main process.

How could I represent this in BPMN ?

Thanks very much in advance.

[kswenson]

- Imagine a quite complex and long process.
- At anytime an external actor could send a mail which will cause this process to be interrupted causing a new process to be launched to process the mail. We cannot go further in the main process until the mail is processed.
- Once the mail is processed, we need to resume the main process.

I don't believe that BPMN has any semantic like this, but it does not prohibit it either.

The Fujitsu Interstage BPM product has a feature called "Run Time Subprocess". What we mean by that is that at any activity (human activity) the user that is assigned the task can basically cause a subprocess to be invoked at that time. This puts that activity into a waiting state until the subprocess has returned. IT is "run time subprocess" because the actual process that is invoked, and when to invoke it, is decided by the user at the time it is needed. We also have "design time subprocess" where you have a special node that automatically invokes a subprocess.

It seem like this "run time subprocess" would handle the case you need.

-Keith Swenson

[Pilou]

Does this representation seems ok to you ? (see attachment)

Attached File(s)

 Business_Process_Diagram1.png ( 7.9K ) Number of downloads: 38

 

[Maarten]

I think that this representation implies that the whole process starts all over... So for example if you would receive that email after task 3, you will process the email (with task 6&7) and then ... start with task 2 all over again.
I think you want to model it as if the whole process is paused, and as soon as the mail is processed, it starts again. In order to do that, you could attach the intermediate message event to the border of tasks 2, 3 and 4. It's not the best solution, but i would not know how to do it differently

[neville bradbury]

Hi there, I believe Intalio can do this and I will get my team to look at it.
Regards,
Neville Bradbury OpenSoft

[Markus Guentert]

Does this representation seems ok to you ? (see attachment)

I started a dicussion @ BPMN-Community to easily disuss the model and to give new proposals.

http://www.bpmn-community.org/forum/15/