A simple business process can involve hiring an employee, processing a sales order, or reimbursing a business expense. A more complex business process can involve many people and activities across an organization.
Sometimes the main goal of a process cannot be achieved. For example, if a product is out of stock, a shipping clerk may need to cancel a sales order. For this reason, a business process must provide for outcomes other than the principal goal. For example, if the product is out of stock it may be possible to offer the client an alternative that the client can then accept or reject. Thus, a process can have a range of possible outcomes.
Business processes include logical steps, called activities, each of which can involve performing one or more tasks.
There are two types of activities: automatic and interactive. Automatic activities are executed automatically by the Process Execution Engine, whereas interactive activities require human input.
The activities of a business process are linked by transitions, which determine the order in which they are performed and the basic workflow of the process.
Each interactive activity belongs to a role, that is, a title or job function performed by participants in the organization. For example, a role could be Supervisor or Finance Administrator.
Participants are the individuals who interact with the process. To perform an activity, a participant must be assigned the role that the activity belongs to. A participant can have one or more roles.
Because it is often impossible to predict every outcome, a business process usually needs a way to deal with exceptions. An exception is an event in which a pre-defined outcome of a process cannot be reached.
The way in which a process deals with such an event, known as exception handling, can involve such steps as data clean-up or notifying a participant with a supervisory role that the situation needs attention.