Related Topics
Process Director enables implementers to retrieve and manipulate data from external sources, such as HR, ERP, or CRM systems, without requiring implementers "to know technical details about the data, such as how it is formatted or where it is physically located", a technique known as Data Virtualization*. One such method of Data Virtualization, for users of Process Director v3.49 and higher, is through the use of Business Values. Using Business Values, Process Director can take data from external systems of record and make it available to implementers for use in managing or directing processes. Business Values, therefore, enable you to drive your applications with real-time data. They are updated whenever they are used; that is, each time a form or process references a specific Business Value, Process Director retrieves the associated external value.
At any given moment there may be hundreds, thousands, even millions of processes underway in your organization, each of them depending on business data. For those processes—many of which operate in the form of custom business applications—to succeed, the information they access must be up-to-date and accurate. Such information may be generated:
- In the course of the process itself, like data a customer enters on a Form, or
- From the organization’s Systems of Record (such as an ERP or CRM system). The data stored in the Systems of Record thus become a vital component of the applications that facilitate all of the organization’s business activities.
Applications that use data from these Systems of Record to interface directly with processes are often referred to as Systems of Engagement, because they enable employees, customers, and others to engage directly in the business at hand.
Process Director addresses these issues by separating the details of accessing systems of record from using the resulting data within a business application. As a result, technical experts can configure the appropriate access mechanism once, and implementers can reuse the information provided anywhere at all, within any application, without having to know or understand how the information was obtained. An implementer may also, on occasion, create a Business Value that references only internal data from Process Director, such as a calculation based on a Knowledge View. In either case, once configured, a Business Value is universally available to implementers.
A fundamental advantage of using a Business Value is that any changes to how the Business Value is derived are transparent—and largely irrelevant—to the implementer. If the organization changes to a different CRM or HR system the Business Value can be reconfigured to use data from the new system without implementers having to make changes to existing processes.
A Business Value can extract a single value, or a list of values such as those in a database table. In the context of a Form, for example, a Business Value can be used to fill out a form Array with a recordset from an external database.
As a default, Process Director will return a maximum of 200 rows in a recordset. This default value can be changed by setting the nMaxBusinessValueRows Custom Variable in the customization file.
Related Topics
Creating Business Values: Instructions on Business Value configuration.
Business Value Operations: Additional capabilities of Business Values.
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