What is a Process Creation Activity?

Process Creation activities are used to invoke another process asynchronously.

Process Creation activities are used for the following reasons:

To speed completion of tasks by simultaneously running more than one process.
To make a complex business process more easily understood by using a Process Creation activity to abstractly represent the underlying process.
To enable reuse - called processes can easily be reused by many calling processes.
To enable Business-to-Business (B2B) communication between processes. As a process calls another process through a Process Creation activity, the called process can be run in another company behind a firewall.
To Balance load. You can design subprocesses to distribute their execution among different servers in order to improve the performance and balance resources load.

Though a Process Creation activity is similar to a Subflow activity in that they both call a subprocess, the Process Creation activity is slightly different from a Subflow activity in the following ways:

It invokes a called subprocess asynchronously, which means that the calling process does not have to wait for the called process to finish before moving forward.
It is responsible for invoking the called subprocess and the called sub process has no requirement to return to the calling process. If this is desired, a Termination Wait activity is used to capture the return.

Using the Process Creation Activity

The following table outlines some of the considerations when using the Process Creation Activity within ALBPM Studio.

WorkSpace	The Process Creation activity is not visible in WorkSpace.
Roles	Process Creation activities can reside in an abstract and in automatic role lanes.
Variables	Process Creation activity can define instance variables to determine the argument mapping.
Pre Conditions	Incoming instance from another activity in the process. The Process Creation activity's Argument Mapping can set the called subprocess' incoming arguments, if applicable, with the local instance variables. A new instance is created in the called subprocess.
Post Conditions	As the called subprocess is invoked and the 'child' instance is successfully created, the instance moves to the next activity in the calling process according to transition rules.
Transitions	Process Creation activities have one or more incoming transition(s) and one or more outgoing transition(s).
Tasks	No tasks are available.
Business Process Methods	No scripting is available. To pass arguments between processes, the Argument Mapping function is available.