The Cúram Workflow Management System (WMS) serves two main functions. The first is to support the automation of business processes. The second is to facilitate the routing of work among individuals and departments. The main components of this system are Workflow Process Definitions, the Workflow Engine, the Inbox and Task Management, and the Workflow Administration application (which includes the Process Definition Tool, PDT). Each one of these plays a role in one or both of these functions.
The automation of a business process starts with the design of a workflow for a business process. Key decisions have to be made in order for a business process to be mapped to a workflow process definition. For example there is an expectation that there will be manual steps involved in the business process or the business process may require configuration over the lifetime of the process. The Workflow PDT is used to create the workflow process definition based on this design. Using the PDT, a workflow developer defines the workflow activities, the transitions between these activities, and the information that passes through the workflow process.
Some of the activity types available in a process definition are as follows: Manual, Automatic, Loop, Event Wait, Route, Notification and Subflow.The PDT can be used to depict the sequence of a workflow process using the above activity types. The above activities are automatically preceded with a Start Process activity and conclude with an End Process activity type by the system, followed by any transitions or looping activities in between the workflow processes.
The Workflow Engine performs the runtime execution of the workflow process definition (i.e. process enactment). As a result of enactment, a workflow process instance is created. These workflow process instances can be monitored and controlled using the Workflow Administration functions provided in the Cúram WMS.
The routing of work among individuals and departments also starts with the workflow process definition. Certain activity types represent work that needs to be completed by an individual or department; for these activities, the workflow process definition includes a strategy for assigning this work. The Workflow Engine evaluates the allocation strategy to determine who should complete this work, creates tasks for this work, and assigns the tasks to the appropriate users, organizational objects (e.g. organization units, positions or jobs) or work queues. The Inbox provides a user with information about the tasks that they need to action. An example of such task management actions include View Task, Forward Task, Add Comment to a task.