jonasach - Thursday, March 22, 2007 3:33 PM:
What is the difference between an activity based workflow vs an entity based worklow?
Could you provide an example using a simple change order.
Is your workflow engine entity based?
RobMcAveney - Friday, March 23, 2007 2:30 PM:
Activity based workflows track the work (actions, activities, tasks, etc.) that people actually perform. Entity based workflows (also known as state based) track the state of an entity during its lifecycle. Innovator supports both models: activity-based is known as workflow and entity-based is known as lifecycle. Some other systems support only one model and attempt to use it to approximate the other. A change order is a good example. Imagine that ten different people needed to review the change order before it can be implemented. You could theoretically create ten different states to represent this, but it can be very confusing to the end user and only works well when the steps are sequential. In Innovator, you would create a single lifecycle state named In Review and ten workflow activities for the reviewers. When all ten activities are completed, automation can be used to promote the change order to its next state.
Another common question along these lines is whether workflow controls lifecycle or vice versa. This often depends on the length of time involved. For something like a change order, with a lifecycle that lasts a few days or weeks, the workflow can be viewed as an overarching process that drives the lifecycle. For something like a Part, which normally has a very long lifecycle, a workflow can be viewed as the steps between states. For example, in order to promote a Part to a state of Obsolete there may be many workflow activities to perform. Upon completion of the workflow, the lifecycle state would change.
