Animate business process with animacian

Animacian is a tool to help you make a process design active by presenting the flow in animation form. You can control the flow of animation yourself to help demonstrating your work to client with your annotation. Furthermore, it helps validate your business process by listing out the valid and invalid execution paths. Finally, it calculates all possible paths for your business process, making the result of process evaluation more accurate.

February 22, 2009
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Edition: Simulacian (Edition comparison)

Animating a path

Here we have a business process diagram describing th business process of handling an order issued by a customer.
bpd

Select Tools > Animacian from the main menu to launch animacian.

This open the Business Process Animacian dialog box where you are can select an execution path to play in animation.

Let's go through different paths of this dialog box.
The Paths list lists all possible executions of the process. You can select a path and animate it by pressing the Play button.

The Components list displays the components that form the selected Path. Pressing on a component will highlight the first shape of the chosen path until the chosen shape, in the opening diagram.

The Filter pane helps removing undesired paths by specifying the decision to make when come across fork nodes. The Option pane allows you to configure the behavior of animacian. We will discuss the Filter and Option panes in more details later in this tutorial.

The buttons and slider at the top of the dialog are for controlling the flow of animation.
Select Path 2 in the Paths list. Observe the highlighted path in business process diagram.
Double click on Path 2 and rename it to Order Complete. Giving a meaningful name to the paths make it easier for path identification.
Click on the Process Order task in the Components list and path start from the Start Event to Process Order are being highlighted.
Press the Play button and the selected path will be animated.
Pause in the middle of the animation, and move the slider to navigate the process back and forth.
Click Forward at the slider. You can go to the previous/next step in the business process by pressing the Forward/Backward button, or pressing Ctrl+Left/Right shortcut key.
Click the Slow Dialog button at the bottom right hand side of the business process diagram to re-open the Business Process Animacian dialog.
Press the Filter... button in the Business Process Diagram Animacian dialog.
The Filter Configuration dialog will be opened. All the possible models involved in making decision in the business process wil be listed in the dialog. You can specify the path for each decision making element in the combo box next to the element.
You can press the ... button next to the element to specify multiple values for the decision.
Select <= 100 in the combo box next to amount>100? Press OK to commit.

Only paths that satisfy the condition are listed. For this case, only two paths are valid.
You can also filter the paths based on the flow type.
Let's go through the options for animating the business process.
Show invalid paths
Turning on this option will cause invalid path in the business process to be listed.

Dim other path
This is for dimming non-selected paths when animating the business process.

Show start node when switch path
This option will scroll the diagram back to the start node for the path when you switch between paths.
Minimize when play
This option minimize animacian to the bottom of the business process diagram when animating a business process.
Lock diagram when playing
This is disabling the editing of the business process diagram when animating a business process.
Show documentation when playing
Select this option and the documentation of the current flow object will be shown when animating a business process.

Play voice when playing
Select this option and the voice documentation of the current task will be played when animating a business process.
The presentation and behavior of the animating business process can be configured inside the Advanced Options dialog. Click on the Advanced Options... button in the Business Process Animacian dialog to configure the presentation.

You can specify the color of elements when you animating the business process.

Property	Description
Visited Error Fill Color	The color of the flow objects which are invalid.
Visited Fill Color	The color of the flow objects which being executed.
Active Shape Initial Fill Color	The initial fill color when the flow objects during execution. You can press the Preview button to animate the change of fill color during execution.
Visited Line Color	The color of the flow which being executed.
Visited Font Color	The font color of the flow objects which being executed.
Visited Line Width	The width of the flow which being executed.
Ball Color	The color of the token which is in the executing business process.

The speed for animating business process can also be configured inside the Advanced Options dialog.
Now, go back to the Business Process Diagram Animacian dialog box. Select Manual in the drop down menu of Path. Manual path enables you to define your own way of executing the process.
Click Add Path.
Select start event in the list on the right hand side.
Click Play to play the path.

Animate business process with animacian

Animating a path

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