Manage workflows via our Business Process Management (BPM) Engine based on Flowable.

Characteristics

Function

In order to establish a standardized approach when working with such a large amount of documents, companies that use DMS systems need to establish and enforce business rules for their processing. For instance, an employee must know which steps are to be performed with an invoice document in order to pay an invoice to a third party, while still complying with bookkeeping rules of the company. The business rules also include multiple technical steps that should be performed by the employee in order to comply with these business rules as well as with the legal norms. For instance, a payed invoice must be marked as such in order to avoid double payment of it, and the retention time of it should be set, to prevent deletion within the time period defined by the law. All this puts a considerable cognitive load onto employees working with documents, since they have to execute their primary task of processing the invoice, while keeping the status of the document up to date (how far has the payment process progressed and what has been done so far) and setting such purely technical fields on the document. 

yuuvis® Momentum is a powerful DMS system that can handle hundreds of millions of documents with ease—whether they are of numerous types, spread over multiple tenants or used by hundreds or thousands of users. In order to efficiently adopt and enforce the business rules, a considerable automation is necessary to be able to support the employees who work on the documents.  And that is why we integrate the yuuvis® Momentum DMS with a workflow functionality in form of a BPM Engine. The DMS stores and manages the documents, and BPM Engine implements the business rules that define how documents are processed in a company. Implementing the business rules as workflows is not only an automation capability, but also a great opportunity for companies to document their business rules.

>> Business Process Management (BPM) Engine

Requirements

In addition to the yuuvis® Momentum core services, BPM-ENGINE has further requirements.

• The service can be used only if Keycloak is connected as the identity provider and role management system for yuuvis® Momentum.

Setting up Identity Management for BPM-ENGINE

The BPM-ENGINE service is based on the workflow functionality of the open source software Flowable. The service is connected to Keycloak in order to obtain information on users and their roles present in the tenant. The Business Process Management can be used only if yuuvis® Momentum uses Keycloak as identity provider and role management system.

Flowable and Keycloak

If Keycloak is used as identity provider and role management system, users are registered as members of realms (corresponding to yuuvis® Momentum tenants) with defined roles assigned to them. Furthermore, users can be assigned to groups which can build a hierarchical structure.

The Keycloak realms and users are directly mapped to tenants and users in Flowable and thus in the BPM-ENGINE. The Keycloak groups are not mapped to Flowable. Keycloak supports the hierarchical group structure that is unique for every tenant. Hierarchical group structures are not supported in Flowable and in addition, since the group structure is unique for every tenant, it would not be possible to develop a model that is valid in multiple tenants and that assigns a user task to a specific group (such as "bookkeepers"). To resolve both of these integration issues, we mapthe  users' Keycloak roles to Flowable groups. Since roles form a flat structure and can be assigned to users from different tenants, they correspond to the groups of users as defined in Flowable.

Once correctly configured, the Groups and Users interface in Flowable REST will provide information on users and groups within the BPM-ENGINE. However, it is not possible to edit users or groups via the BPM-ENGINE service. This has to be done in Keycloak.

BPM-ENGINE Service Configuration

In order to use Keycloak as Flowable IDM Provider, the BPM-ENGINE service has to be appropriately configured.

Especially, the conversion of the Keycloak roles into Flowable groups can be customized via the keycloak.idm.groups.role-filter parameter.