Features and Benefits

Business Process Management

Model Business Processes Visually

Create business processes visually using an intuitive graphical user interface (the Flux Designer) or through the Web 2.0 Ajax-enabled business process designer. All created business processes have the option of being stored in XML.

Business Process Dashboard

What do you need to do today? Sign in to the Flux Business Process Dashboard to view the business processes that are waiting on you to make decisions, provide data to others, and to take action. The Flux Business Process Dashboard displays your business processes, gives you direction on your activities, and tells you what to pay attention to.

Rich Business Process Forms

Design web-based forms that collect and display data in your business processes. Flux's Business Process forms include text fields, various kinds of choices & selections, file attachments, required & optional elements, groupings, and line items containing a variable number of other data fields that can appear on a business process form.

As a simple example, consider a document routing and approval business process. People create a variable number of documents that must be routed to other people and subsequently approved. Use a Flux Business Process form that contains "line items" to model this business need.

Decision Making Requiring Human Judgment

Your organization's business processes require decisions. Use Flux BPM to design and execute business processes that present your decision makers with your business dilemmas and possible solutions. Your people make the judgment call.

Flux automates the process up to — but NOT including — your people who have the actual experience to make the right decisions. This is the kind of experience that cannot be automated by software. This is one of the very fundamental definitions of Business Process Management.

Supervisors and Subordinates

Route business processes to supervisory and subordinate employees within an organization. For example, purchase requisitions exceeding a certain threshold can be routed to a supervisor for approval.

The Human Element

Model your company's business processes that require people to exercise judgment and to take action.

The Software Element

Use Flux BPM when your business processes need to connect your people to your software systems. We call this scenario human-to-system (H2S) processing.

Signals

Signals are mechanisms used to notify workflow tasks of important events within a single workflow. Using signals, you can create intricate dependencies among the various tasks in a workflow. Signals are passed strictly within a single workflow. To pass messages between different workflows, use Flux Messages (described below).

Messages

Messages are like signals, except they are passed between different jobs and workflows running in a Flux engine or across a cluster of Flux engines. Like signals, messages are used to create dependencies among different workflows and can contain data.

Aborts, Consensus, and Vetoes

You can create business processes that abort the primary flow of execution when a significant external event occurs, such as when a software process or a human decides to abort the processing of a business process.You can also design business processes that achieve consensus, such as when two out of three people need to be in agreement in order to make a decision.Finally, you can model a veto situation where if any one person does not want to proceed, the business process follows the "veto" course of action.

Audit Trail, Heartbeat Status Events, Logging

Flux includes a complete audit trail for recording significant actions that take place within Flux. Heartbeat status events allow you to monitor the health of your Flux engines and the surrounding environment. Finally, logging gives detailed information on Flux's activities, which provides useful diagnostic and monitoring information to software developers and system administrators.

Deadlines and SLAs

Business Processed can now be monitored to make sure they are completed with in an appropriate amount of time. Deadlines are shown graphically in the Operations Console and can also be queried using the Flux APIs.

Embeddability

Flux BPM can be easily embedded into your application. Our dashboard is available as a portlet (JSR-168). The web-based Operations Console can be branded to your look-and-feel using CSS. All Flux BPM functionality is also accessible using a very extensive set of APIs.