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Today's business processes have to address many, complex requirements. Mass customization leads to personalized, contextual products being offered by governments and enterprisesGovernments and enterprises offer personalized and contextual products, whereas customers and citizens all have their own unique demands. As a result, the business processes for selling and offering these products are divers and contextual as well. At the same time, regulations in the area of compliance and a growing rate of change introduce additional complexity. These developments pose major challenges to the field of business process modeling (BPM). Conventional process modeling, in terms of activities and the flow they are executed in, has proven to lead to complex and often rigid business processes. Dynamic processes, as part of dynamic case management, are an answer to the problems and challenges that conventional business processes face.

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Dynamic processes are processes in which not all possible scenarios are completely delineated upfront. In dynamic processes there is no diagram, model or code available that tells us which possible scenarios can occur and what to do when in each scenario. In stead of meticulously connecting activities to establish completeness in flow, in dynamic processes all activities can in theory attribute to the process. For each activity that is part of the process, a precondition simply states when the activity can be performed. Such a precondition is a boolean statement that makes use of the available data, the artifacts in the system and the state or phase the process is in. A dynamic process engine (like Blueriq) will decide at runtime which activities can and must be performed at any given moment in the process. In Blueriq, dynamic preconditioned activities are modeled as ad-hoc tasks.

From a Blueriq-point-of-view, it is not mandatory to use preconditions and ad-hoc tasks exclusively, nor is it mandatory to use flow exclusively. One of the unique aspects of Blueriq is that both approaches are available and can be intertwined to get the best of both worlds. So whenever there is an activity that may only be performed when another activity is completed, it can be modeled with flow.

Design

Many Some people are concerned that - when using ad-hoc tasks - the business process model becomes more difficult to understand and maintain than when flow was used. In situations where no good design is made upfront, they might very well be right! If a process with 20 a lot of activities was is modeled by simply piling all up dumping all these activities and creating in one single batch and just create (complex) preconditions for all of these activities, this will have no benefit over a flowchart.

In However, in business processes however, it is very uncommon that all activities can be applicable throughout the entire process. At a certain point (in dynamic case managment terms: when a certain milestone is reached), some activities are simply not part of the process anymore. Or not part of the process yet. This is why business processes can be dissected into phases. Using phases, milestones, ad-hoc tasks and preconditions will result in really dynamic and flexible business processes, without the downside of delineating all scenarios upfront and connecting the activities with all possible paths.

Below a schematic outline of such a process with phases, activities and milestones is shown.

It is not really necessary to understand every tiny detail of the process diagram shown above. It is more important to understand the different dynamic case management concepts behind it:

• Phase

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• Task/Activity

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• Milestone

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• Precondition

. These concepts - and depending concepts - are discussed below.

One of the aspects An important aspect of the process design shown here, is that on at the highest level, we speak of phases rather than processes. A phase resembles a period of time within the entire process when you are the end user is free to perform a lot of tasks that are applicable in that phase and contribute to the goal of the phase. Tasks that are not applicable anymore or not yet are not shown, making the application more understandable for the end user. The goal of the phase is called a milestone (in this diagram depicted by a diamond ). Whether a milestone is reached or not is merely a decision, based on availability of data and artifacts in the system.

The tasks within a phase are mostly ad-hoc or automated, but this is not necessarymandatory. Blueriq has the ability to mix ad-hoc and automated tasks with flow-oriented tasks. The most important aspect of this process design is that it the availability and necessity of the tasks depends on the availability of data and artifacts, and not on the completion of other tasks. 

As mentioned before, phases consist of tasks. These tasks produce data, which is entered into the system, for instance about an applicant or about a desired product. Tasks also produce artifacts, such as uploaded documents, pictures etc. and generated documents. Preconditions are decisions that tell when the tasks can be (or even must be) performed. These decisions are all based on data, artifacts and artifactsother decisions.

In the design shown above, also a row is reserved for the roles that participate in each phase. Although this is absolutely necessary in business process modeling, it is left out of scope in this article.

An The Blueriq-design of the example of a the process with four phases shown above, is given below.

The process above shows different dynamic case management concepts, such as phases and different types of tasks and phases.

Phases

Most processes are - from a high point of view - very linear. So is our example: it consists of the sequential phases Apply, Pay, Decide, Register. In the vast majority of business processes, all the phases are singular and linear, meaning a case or process will always be in one phase and after that phase, another phase will follow. When during the design of phases it turns out that many phases can be applicable at once and many different phases might follow a phase, the granularity of the phase is probably off:

Sometimes a phase can be skipped. In this particular example, when registration is rejected on grounds of inadmissibility, the phase registering is skipped right after deciding. The rejection because of inadmissibility is done when the application is not complete or documents are not valid and the applicant is not able to provide the necessary information. When the application is complete and all documents are valid, registration could still be denied. This is because the application is not eligible, although complete and valid. Non-eligible applications are registered as well as eligible applications, but with a negative decision. Rejections, as mentioned before, are not registered at all.

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