While at TechED in Vegas this year I was asked for a one pager document on Guided Procedures. So, here are the highlights of Guided Procedures. Information you should share with senior management when considering the use of Guided Procedures.
- Composite Applications are user centric applications supporting highly collaborative and dynamic business processes which span beyond functional, system, and organizational boundaries.
- Composite Applications make use of data and functions provided as services by platforms and applications, combining these into user-centric processes and views, supported by own business logic and specific user interfaces.
- Composite Applications are composed using services, UI building blocks, and building a process flow.
- Guided Procedures is the tool to build the process flow.
- Guided Procedures is a framework for modeling and managing processes that involve access to multiple backend systems.
- Guided Procedures are designed to implement business processes with greater ease and speed across multiple applications.
- Guided Procedures enables users without specialized software development skills to easily set up and execute collaborative business processes.
- Guided Procedures allows the invocation of various types of applications and services within a process (Web Dynpro, external service, RFC’s…)
- Guided Procedures navigates the user through UI-driven, people centric, distributed and collaborative business processes.
- Guided Procedures enables offline process execution via Interactive Forms.
The major features of Guided Procedures include:
- GP design time – set of functions enabling business experts to model processes and create reusable components
- GP callable objects – most fine grained elements created in the design time; enable the execution of external applications and services within the GP framework
- GP process flow – callabe objects are attached to actions (representing process steps at runtime) which are executed in blocks either sequentially, in parallel, or in a loop
- GP data context – the design time supports the definition of data persistency between process steps and enables mapping between the parameters of the process building elements
- GP roles – allows the assignment of roles to certain actions
- GP runtime – process initiation from a process template and follow its execution; process contributors are guided through the process steps to complete the tasks assigned to them
- GP work items – a contributor acts only when a work item appears in his Universal Worklist (role based)
- GP interactive forms – enables the implementation of form based processes
- GP administration – system administrators can monitor and administer process instances and GP system data
Guided Procedures callable objects enable you to easily build a process that links to mulitple application systems. Callable objects enable you to link to exact application functionality. In the following graphic you can see examples of application links available with callable objects.
- BI Application enables you to link to a SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence query.
- External Service enables you to call any RFC or BAPI from an SAP system.
- Composite Application Service enables you to call a service develop using our Composite Application Framework available in SAP NetWeaver Development Studio.
- Web Service enables you to call an external web service by providing the WSDL definition.
- For user interfaces you could call a Visual Composer application (WD4VC Application), a Web Dynpro (Java or ABAP), an SAP transaction code, iView, BSP, web page, or a KM Resource.
- The forms callable objects enable you to create a small form or to insert a form designed in Adobe LiveCycle Designer and use it as an Interactive Form.
These are just a few of the choices. You can also have a user decision step, business logic step, steps to read user data.
The callable objects enable you to link to diverse applications in the same way. This enables the non-professional developer to create processes that link to diverse applications, without the need to know the implementation details of each application function.
Guided Procedures enable a business process expert to build processes that are decoupled from the application systems. Each process can easily span functional, organizational, and system boundaries.
For more information on Composite Applications and Guided Procedures, see the BPX Community on SDN and the CAF Community on SDN.
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