Key Concepts

This page introduces some of key concepts related to designing a business process with Emakin and terminology used.

Process

Put simply, a process is a way of doing your work. It's a structured way of organizing activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product.

For example: When your computer is malfunctioning you may call a technical guy on the phone and wait for him to come over, or you may start Incident Request process that is automatically assigned to the relevant technical person and instantly trace the current status of your request.

Using a clearly-defined process flow saves you from chaos while doing your work. All of your daily business activities can ultimately be defined as a process.

In emakin everything you do is about starting a new process or completing an assigned task from your inbox. Even defining a new user or terminating a workflow instance is controlled by a process.

Folder

Processes are categorized in a security controlled folders. Folders are generally used to access start points of process or reporting business data. Folders can be contain other folders to build a hierarchical organization. You can create new folders any time or automatically created when you install a process from app store.

Channel

Channels are used for team work related communication and collaboration. Channel consist of activities in stream and list of cases. Every user or robot operation are logged as activity in channel including standard chat messages.

Case

"Case" is a issue of need to handled by channel members. Once is open you can assign to a channel member to handle required actions. After all operations are completed you can close the case if no further action is required.

Case action can be a simple profile update, manual operated action or a initiated processes instance.

Process Definition

In emakin everything you define, stored in a process definition in a XML format. Process definition contains the all of required information (diagram, databases, reports, web service connections) to run. Process definitions are also versioned under processes for switch to different versions of process any time.

Business Data

Every process exists to produce a result. In emakin from beginning to end result of process transported in XML format called as data model. Data model may contain unlimited fields and lists. You can also store more complex data structures like hierarchies.

Generally business data is empty when workflow is started but while workflow advances data is filled by people or integrated systems.

Work List

Work List is a list of work items that assigned to people. Work items are filtered by tags to distinguish for easy access.  All of new assigned work items are tagged with "Inbox" but you can remove it to review later. Until work item is complete by you or another user all of waiting work items are tagged with "All Waiting" and you cant remove this tag. When you complete a work item its tagged with "Sent" tag. If you need to list of all work items without any state filter you can use the "All" tag.

Some of work items are automatically tagged with "Watched" by process design and you can remove if no longer needed.

Additionally you can use your custom defined tags to filter work items.

Work Item

Work Item is a step in workflow, while workflow advances in process every step creates a new work item that assigned to people or system. Work item may be assigned to one or more user. Until it's complete by a user stays in user's work list. Some of work items are assigned to system to execute automated tasks and does not have interactive action with any user.

Document Archive

Document archive stores the all document based data. Documents may be generated by processes or manually imported by people. All of documents may contain one or more attached file and search profile. You can search documents by full text index or specific search fields.