#925 - OCI Process Automation - Dynamic Processes

As in real life, many of your business processes won't follow a structured or sequential path. They might have many possible activities that experts could act on as needed, given the situation. Think of an insurance claims case, where experts could be brought in as necessary to examine documents, pictures of damaged vehicles etc. Based on their findings, we could find ourselves dealing with a case of possible fraud etc. OPA allows us to create such processes, so let's away!

Activities: the actions taken within the process, e.g. review claim, ask for fraud check etc.

Stages: Your dynamic process can be divided into stages. Think of a stage as a bucket for related activities, activites that must be completed inorder to achieve a Milestone e.g. 

Stage 1 - Initial Investigation includes tasks such as validate claim report, review pictures of damaged vehicle. Our milestone, the outcome of this stage, we could call "Initial Investigation Completed". Depending on the outcome, this could result in Stage 2 - Fraud Investigation - being triggered.

You get the idea!

Here is my simple dynamic process - the prep work included defining a Claim Business Type - 

A Form with 3 presentation types - for claim entry, initial investigation and fraud checking.

Two structured processes - 

RequestDocsProcess simply emails the claimant requesting more documentation related to the accident etc.

SettleClaimProcess emails the repair shop to confirm they can start repairing the vehicle.

I also added the following roles - 

Let's now orchestrate the dynamic process, now that we have all of the pieces -

 

Note, each stage can have it's own set of activities. Also note the Activities section below the Stages. Here one can define common activities, invokable  at every stage. An example could be activity to ask for more documentation from a claimant. 

Before we get into the different activities one can have in stages, let's look at how we can kick off this claims case - 

As you can see, the case can be initiated via a form or the arrival of a message. I choose the form option. 

Here are the different types of activities available - 

The Initial Investigation Stage includes 1 Human Task Activity. Let's look at its configuration - 

As you can see, the properties allow for great flexibility. The Initial Investigation stage, in our use case, is mandatory and can only happen once. The task is assigned to the Claims role.

Further properties include -

Note the Task Outcome - I needed to create this variable - very easy to do - 

I created an outcome variable for the fraud check as well as one for the claim object itself. More about them later.

Now to the Fraud Check Stage - I only want this triggered when the initial investigation rejects the claim.

 

I can specify this through an activation rule - 

The Fraud Check human task is configured analogue to the InitialInvestigation human task, so I will not go into the details here.

Now to the common activity - 

Only structured processes with a None start event can be included here. So the next question is - how to I pass parameters to this process?

Simple - You define these within the process. 

Here is the process - 

 

Now to the Data Mapping - 

The same procedure is used for the Settle Claim Stage activity, so I will not go into detail about it here.

Now we are ready to process a claim - 

Here I see the different stages and their individual status. I see 2 activities available - InitialInvestigation and RequestDocs(the repeatable common task). Let's activate the latter - 

The Claimant receives the email - 

In the meantime, let's do the initial investigation - 

What does the case status look like now?

The Fraud Checker takes over - 

No fraud here, so let's settle the claim and inform the repair shop - 

Summary

Granted, a simple example - but the goal was to show you the mechanics of implementing such in OCI Process Automation. I hope you can extrapolate and see the business value add Dynamic Processes offer you and your customers. By the way, the vehicle registration plate details I used - HMI 819 - were from a Renault 8 my parents bought in the late 1960s - they don't make care like that anymore -