The benefits of the Step Workflow project include:

  • No advanced ActiveVOS (Informatica’s internal business process manager) experience is required to design workflows for Product 360 use cases.
  • The development of new workflows is more structured and repeatable
  • New workflows are easier to troubleshoot
  • Fewer issues because of tested re-usable code
  • Reduce the number of running processes on the ActiveVOS server
  • Enable batching multiple capabilities in a single workflow

The Step Workflow provides many capabilities, including:

  • DQ Rule execution for cleansing, validation, and enrichment
  • Create human tasks, including different paths for approval and rejection
  • Automate field values
  • Merge records into the master catalog

Step Workflow Use case

Let’s apply this concept to an actual Use Case.

Requirements

Whenever a new Product is created or an item is onboarded from any source, the following should occur:

  • Assign the Product to its respective business unit category,
  • Populate appropriate attributes based on specific business rules.
  • Update the status field at each level, indicating the particular fields are populated as needed.
  • Require approval by two different business groups.

Automating these requirements ensures the quality is maintained and enriched before publishing the new Product downstream.

Here’s a diagram of the required workflow:


Solution

To automate these business processes, we implemented Step workflows. This Step workflow provides DQ channel/Rule execution, Task creation, Update field, and Merge. So overall, the “Step Workflow” samples will enable rapidly designing business-case-specific workflows with workflow tasks, Flex UIs, data quality checks, and approve tasks based on a simple XML definition.

Implementation

Here are the steps involved in the BPM workflow that is designed as a process that gets triggered as soon as the Product is created or the Item gets imported into the Master Catalog via the hot folder or manually.

  • Check if there are products in the step workflow.
  • Run DQ channels that create tasks for user groups and use flex UI templates for each DQ channel.
  • Update the status field in Product 360 after completing the DQ channel tasks.
  • Again, from the completion of onboarding, the other two-step workflows triggered parallelly for Marketing Approval and Regulatory Approval for the same data onboarded into the Master Catalog.
  • Suppose both business units approve the onboarded data by saying ‘Yes’ in the Regulatory and Marketing Approval Fields. In that case, the status field is updated to ‘Approved,’ and hence, the data are Standardized according to the business’s requirements.
  • Updating the data in Product 360 will trigger the Approval step workflows again to get it approved by the Marketing and Regulatory business groups. Lastly, the status field will be updated again to ‘Approved.’