PAD is based on the technology of Flow Designer. As a business process owner, it allows you to organize flows into unified cross-enterprise processes and provide your users with a guided path through the process life-cycle with playbooks.
CHALLENGES FOR AGENTS AND DEVELOPERS IN COMPLEX PROCESSES
Before the introduction of PAD, agents could easily get lost in complex processes.
In addition to agents, process owners and developers also face challenges in creating cross-departmental processes in ServiceNow.
VISION STATEMENT
Provide Business Process Owners a builder to digitize, visualize, and manage end-to-end workflows across business services, enabling Agents to visualize that workflow in a simplified, task-oriented view.
PRODUCT BENEFIT
So, what does Process Automation Designer offer to process owners and ServiceNow developers? PAD uses the integrated low-code Flow Designer for extensible workflow automation. Model your enterprise workflows in a low/no-code process authoring experience to coordinate manual, automated, and integration process activities. These can run in parallel or sequential and use data flow to pass data between process activities using a no-code data picker. PAD allows for adaptive case progression based on changes to case context and previous process activity outcomes. Agents benefit from the integrated Agent Workspace user experience (playbooks) with progressive guidance on when and where in the process they currently are, insight into the previous and precise info on the next steps.
PAD is extendable with the NOW Platform capabilities such as Service Level Management, Performance Analytics, Machine Learning, etc. It is important to note that Process Automation Designer does not replace Flow Designer. The new designer leverages Flow Designer as the action plan behind each process activity. PAD automates existing NOW Platform capabilities (e.g., record creation, update, approvals, notifications, etc.), and records created through process execution can still be interacted with as if they were created using any other method.
PARTS
Process definitions (PD) will run based on their defined trigger. Currently, triggers include records inserted or updated. Re-usable trigger templates can be provided by a developer or process admin, which pre-fill the table and some conditions for triggering a process execution. Similar to workflows and flows, changes made in a process definition will be saved but not published until you’re ready and click Activate in the designer. Any in-flight processes will finish with the configuration in which they were started. Published changes will only affect newly created process executions.
In the process design space, your process phases are represented as lanes that can run sequentially or parallel. Each lane can contain one or multiple activities, the building blocks that make up a process and run in sequence or parallel (just like lanes). Each activity represents either a Flow, Subflow, or Flow Action. Subflow and action inputs and outputs simultaneously serve as inputs and outputs for the PAD activity. PAD comes with several OOB activities and components for their playbook representation. Developers and content creators can add custom activities that invoke custom flows or flow actions.
Playbook Experience allows you to configure the process representation in Agent Workspace and custom workspaces. The playbook can be displayed either in the Contextual Side Panel or as a Related Item. It will render a playbook for the first process execution triggered for the specified parent table and parent sys_ID. If multiple process executions were triggered for this parent record, the first one will take precedence.
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