Visio Templates and Simulations: A great way to create business process models and Sharepoint workflow
If you follow EndUserSharePoint.com on a regular basis, you know that in addition to running the site, I’m the Chief Community Officer and SharePoint Evangelist for Global 360. In the past week at Global 360, we launched a set of Visio templates that help you model basic business processes using standard BPMN notation.
One of the biggest developments in SharePoint workflow is the ability to create the workflow models in Visio and export them into SharePoint Designer for use in your sites. This is a great way to get started.
There are six templates currently available with a couple more to be added each month. These Visio process models will run in Visio 2003 up to the current versions. For those Power Users with Visio 2010 Premium, we’ve also included simulations through an add-on called AnalystView, where you can add stats to workflow processes and run live simulations to see where the system will bottleneck, even before you implement it.
The Six Templates
- Accounts Payable – The process model and simulation reveal several departmental tasks that can be performed in parallel, accelerating payment completion rates.
- Loan Processing – A bank uses process simulation to assess the impact of upcoming marketing programs aimed at first-time auto buyers.
- Insurance Claim Processing – An insurance company explores alternatives to improve an existing process and reduce operational costs.
- HR Employee On-boarding (two templates)
- Template 1: HR department needs to meet 45-day service level agreement to complete the on-boarding of a new employee. Process template shows how the company achieved their goal.
- Template 2: With 300-400 employees joining and departing the company every two months, the HR organization is constantly recruiting, training, and relieving staff. Process template shows how the company achieved their service level agreement goals.
- Change of Address Request Processing – Bank needs to process 120,000 change of address requests annually. Process template demonstrates their move from paper-based to automated process.
Get Started with the Visio Templates
Each model is a free download. To help business analysts better understand the models, simulation results, and improvement reports within the templates, a companion guide provides a summary of each business situation. Pretty cool stuff.
I hope you’ll jump over and see if there’s anything of interest. We’re going to build a community around these templates, so leave a comment below on other processes you’d like to see and what you would find useful. Contributions and input from the community are going to be critical to making these into real-world scenarios. Think of them as frameworks and models to start with, and then tweak them out from there.
Looking forward to your feedback and contributions. — Mark
I want to provide some important clarification here to minimize any potential confusion with the Visio Process Templates mentioned above.
There are two ways to design processes for SharePoint starting from Visio Premium 2010. The first is to start with SP workflow shapes that are new in Visio Premium 2010 and export to Designer. When starting with the SP workflow shapes and exporting to SP Designer, you will be taking advantage of the native SP workflow. If you want to learn more about this approach, read Wictor Wilen’s EUSP article at: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/08/30/sharepoint-2010-and-visio-2010-better-together-part-1/.
The other method is to start with Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN — the industry standard for business process modeling) shapes new in Visio Premium 2010 and export via XPDL to a BPM suite of your choice. Over 60 BPM suites provide support for the XPDL import. When taking the BPMN + XPDL route, you are really bypassing Windows Workflow Foundation as the technology that manages workflow in SharePoint. This route will use the process engine of the BPM solution of your choice.
If you want to learn more about the differences between BPM and Workflow managed processes, see Ahmed Hafeez’s EUSP article from last week, Making Sense of SharePoint’s Workflow and BPM Capabilities. (http://tinyurl.com/27zdovu)
The Process Templates mentioned above provide an industry-standard starting point for designing and deploying managed business processes. As Mark mentions, any Visio user from 2003 and up has the ability to view and use the process models.
Global 360 is building a library of the BPMN processes in Visio and making them available for free. That said, because there are two paths – both with their own advantages — available for managing workflow and business processes in SharePoint, we invite others to contribute sample workflow models to this community using the Visio SharePoint workflow shapes.
If you have Visio Premium 2010 and couple it with the Global 360 analystView plug-in, you get to see the process model come to life in a simulation, and you get the XPDL import/export feature. Additionally, when exporting the model to Global 360’s Process360 for SharePoint solution, you are replacing SharePoint’s workflow engine, but SharePoint remains the content repository aligned to the process, and all of the user interfaces are built with SharePoint webparts. Therefore, you are not exiting SharePoint to orchestrate your process management efforts. .
Thank you! I think that is a new chapter for my SharePoint experience!
In the article above it is mentioned that, “One of the biggest developments in SharePoint workflow is the ability to create the workflow models in Visio and export them into SharePoint Designer for use in your sites”. Is this available with SharePoint Designer 2007 and MOSS 2007.
thanks for sharing ;-)
The link http://tinyurl.com/245f2an seems to be broken. Can I have the correct URL please?
-Rgds,
N.T.GOPALAKRISHNAN
N.T. – Link should be working now, without the shortener. Thanks for the heads up. — Mark
The new link worked. Thanks, Mark!!