At ProcessMaker, and the BPM industry as a whole, we are living process automation. Every day, our team is constantly thinking about business process solutions in a variety of industries and how to best adapt BPM concepts to be useful and easily accessible to the end-user. Outside of the BPM industry bubble, our users (you!) might interact with the software simply to complete your daily tasks and then leave your offices to go on with your life. However, your experience with processes does not end when you go through the office door at the end of the day. The concept of the process is ubiquitous, and workflow patterns are related to almost everything we do.
What’s a process?
Most definitions of processes read something like “a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end”. This definition is generic and could be applied to almost anything, for example, a bee that’s collecting pollen from a flower and comes back to the swarm, a kid that is going to the school and takes the school bus to get there, buying all the groceries on a grocery list, or a line of people trying to get their favorite coffee in the morning. All of these examples fit the definition of a process since they all include a series of actions or steps carried out in a sequence to complete a goal. Now think, what would happen if you change the order of any of the steps needed to complete the goal? In some of the examples mentioned above, the order matters: you cannot get your favorite coffee in the morning if you don’t go to the line first, or the bee cannot come back to the swarm to make honey if it doesn’t collect the pollen, right? On the other hand, when buying the items on a grocery list, the order in which they are put into the shopping cart is irrelevant as long as all the items are purchased. Some processes happen once and others multiple times. Naming a new family member happens once for parents, but in the same family, the process of buying milk or cereal happens multiple times. In the context of a gym or spa, assigning memberships to new members also happens many times. Here, there are two concepts to keep in mind: context and recurrency. Both concepts, in combination with the concept of order, can help us understand processes more easily.
