Manage Processes

Overview

The Process tab provides a visual, dynamic diagram of your application's business processes. Based on the requirements and personas you've already defined, this view uses an interactive canvas and helps you and your stakeholders align on the expected flow of work, key decisions, and outcomes before development begins.

It is important to understand the role of the process diagram in the application planning process:

• Logical, not executable: The process you create in Composer is a high-level logical model designed to capture the business view of the process. It is not a fully configured, executable Appian process model.
• Foundation for process models: This process serves as the foundation for generating executable process models. However, the transformation is not one-to-one. A single process diagram may result in multiple process models in your application. A developer will need to perform further refinement and build out the final process models.

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Common use cases for processes

Use processes in Composer for the following scenarios:

• Align on requirements: Walk through the visual process diagram with both business and IT stakeholders to confirm that the application requirements are correctly understood and represented. This is ideal for ensuring alignment on a primary process before development begins.
• Model complex processes: For complex applications, you can model multiple related or unrelated processes. You can also break down a single large process into smaller, more readable sub-sections for clarity.

Create your process

The process canvas is where you model your process. You can drag and drop different elements onto the canvas to represent the steps in your business process. Composer automatically provides swimlanes based on the different parties responsible for tasks, such as different user roles or system actors.

To create your process:

1. Navigate to the Process tab to access the modeling canvas.
2. Define the flow using the following elements:
   • Start and End Events: Use Start and End events to mark the beginning and end of a process.
   • Activity: Represent tasks that need to be completed. These can be user tasks (requiring human interaction) or automated tasks (performed by Appian).
   • Gateway: Represent decision points in your process where the path can change based on specific conditions or rules you have defined.
3. Use connectors to link the elements together, showing the sequence of steps. You can also create looping structures for steps that need to be repeated.

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