How do you handle different variant of a process model for different areas of your company?

[shreenithnaik]

Different areas in terms of regions, countries or business units.
Especially if you are in big size company you might have the need for adaption of a standardized process to different needs.

Options to my knowledge so far:

the view creation feature (limited functionality e.g. when skipping 2 steps in sequence),
duplication of the process (not great due to double data handling),
building variants with gateways (not great for complex processes)

[DanielLerch]

New year, same challenge,

for me it works to create one master process with all the informations. The special path is build in as a gateway. Then i create different views for each target group.

I don't know if there will be a problem for some hub users. I think they have to learn that they have to check if there are special views for their country/department.

[remy_marssoukine_cmacgm]

Good day,

I am facing the same issue and one of the workaround we found was to create an attribute called "Applicable Country" as a list and linking to the Dictionary. But that means we have to maintain all countries in our Dictionary and still have to duplicate the process for each group of applicable countries it is refering to.

[chemmerich]

We are new customers to SAP Signavio and we are struggling with this currently. It is a challenge to determine how to best handle country or area process exceptions (apart from the standard process). I will keep following this and let you know how we attend to accomplish this. At this point I don't have an answer.

[carmen_eliescu]

We are facing the same challenge. I think working with the views would be a great thing. But two things should be fixed regarding this functionality:

1. As of now it is still buggy (especially if you have a lot of information flows, or the changes are generally more complex)

2. It should be possible to restrict access of certain versions to certain user groups

Until this function delivers better results, we have to stick to duplicated processes.

[martin_kroehner]

One of our customers told us they have a couple of these use cases and have been discussing the possibilities for this in Signavio with the product management team. Their impression is that we realize the worth of this but also recognize different customers handle this differently, sometimes complicating the design requirements. The first concepts seem promising though.

Just to sketch their situation: the company is represented globally and has close to 70 chemical production sites next to mostly regionalized support functions. Their processes have a global owner to ensure they keep that standardized view as much as possible. They deal with this in a mixture of solutions at the moment, aiming to converge to one process.

They firstly challenge the difference. Their firm belief is that they should be able to work with standardized processes everywhere as this also is the actual transfer of best practices (except mainly for local legislatory differences causing most of the time just an extra step). Sometimes by describing the activity at the overarching level and moving the minor differences into the work instruction level this can be easily solved. Example: "Generate transport documents" instead of "Apply for T1 declaration". This is not easy for a lot of people as they can often only the instance of what they are dealing with (particular forms, systems, etc.) and not the concept of what they are doing.

When transferring regionally-specific processes from other representations into Signavio, they sometimes start with a duplicate if the starting variants appear too far apart. By structuring them according to BPMN, closer alignment of the agreed basis is usually an option. It greatly helps to keep repeating the mantra of verb-noun(-modifier) for tasks, and a state for start and end events. They have configured their syntax and modeling checks to enforce a far-reaching standardization of how to draw a process correctly.

For smaller differences that remain, they combine creating views with the variants with gateways or text annotations to make cleaner representations. This not only applies to regional differences but also to minor variations in a process. Example: when they load a truck with a bulk liquid, the truck is weighed when entering and leaving the site. When they have packed goods (e.g. on a pallet), weighing is not necessary. So in this example, the weigh before and after tasks are in line with the process flow would receive a callout and can be blended out in a separate view for a bulk truck. When there is an either/or variant (task A or task B depending on condition), they use the gateway-with-view option. As you mentioned, this is only works for just one to a few tasks in a diagram before it becomes messy.