Managing processes

Most business processes are fairly complex and you rarely define a process that works out of the box. As long as your process definition is not complete, you can edit and test it locally with the Application Engine Process Editor.

After you have fully completed and tested the process, you can publish it with the Application Engine Process Editor.

Before you publish a process, you must ensure that the process is valid. You must document it and you must provide the required information according to the rules of the BI# programming language.

Whenever you publish a process, it is stored in the application database of the farm to which you are currently connected. The process receives a unique version number. You cannot change or delete the version number of a process. You can load each version of a process separately in the Application Engine Process Editor. When you modify and publish a process, its version number is automatically incremented by one. If you select the option Publish with overwrite (removes all older versions), all old process versions are removed and the process is published with version number 1.

To use a process in other Infor EPM applications, you must specify its name and its version. This information ensures that even if you change a process, it does not affect any product that uses a former version of the process. If you prefer to use a different version of a process, you must explicitly change it in the application where it is used. In this way, auditors can check whether any process version has changed since the last audit.

In each process, you must define the version of the runtime implementation that it uses. This is another mechanism to ensure better compliance. Just as a version of a process never changes, also the runtime version never changes. If you update products to newer versions, all former runtime implementations are provided unchanged. If new functions are provided, they come with an additional runtime version. To address a new runtime version explicitly, you must change the process, which again is verifiable.

If the process is protected, you cannot publish a new version of it. Protected processes can only be updated in EPM Administration at the time when you update the application.

You can connect to a database (OLAP or SQL) through the Application Engine Service.