Workflow

In the dynamic world of academia, managing academic visitor applications efficiently is crucial. The University of Oxford Mathematical Institute has embraced the power of Drupal  and the Maestro module to streamline and enhance their academic visitor application process. Let's delve into the seamless workflow that facilitates this crucial task.

The General Design

Initiation: Academics or their assistants initiate the process by filling in a comprehensive multi-page webform tailored to their needs.

We are pleased to announce the latest release of our workflow engine, Maestro. In this release, we have not only addressed a few minor bugs but also introduced several significant enhancements. These enhancements empower you to automate complex business processes that extend beyond your Drupal environment, opening up a world of possibilities.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) needed to automate an internal document approval process where any given launch of the workflow could:

Gartner recently released an interesting tech note discussing how automated business processes and online integration and transformation of business workflow should be a focus for businesses. By 2022, 50% of digital business technology platform projects will connect events to business outcomes using event-driven intelligent business process management suite (iBPMS)-oriented frameworks - here is a link to the Gartner article.

The Maestro module and it's use-case can be challenging to understand and we recognized there was a need to provide a better explanation and examples.

It's fair to say that every company and organization from small to large has business processes involving the movement of forms and or documents with varying degrees of complexity and number of participating internal and external users. Maestro was developed to help automate these processes with it's workflow editor and workflow engine.

If it can be flow-charted, then it can be automated with Maestro.

In my last post “Untapped Areas for Business Improvements” I attempted to point out the various areas where the potential exists for significant returns for your business through intelligent work automation. As well, time was given to examine some of the more obvious impediments as to why so little is done in this area.

This is part 4 of the Maestro for Drupal 8 blog series, defining and documenting the various aspects of the Maestro workflow engine.  Please see Part 1 for information on Maestro's Templates and Tasks, Part 2 for the Maestro's workflow engine internals and Part 3 for information on how Maestro handles logical loopback scenarios.

Many organization still struggle with the strain of manual processes that touch critical areas of the business. And these manual processes could be costlier that you think. It’s not just profit that may be slipping away but employee moral, innovation, competitiveness and so much more. This article will outline the reasons and approaches for business process improvements.

This is part 3 of the Maestro for Drupal 8 blog series, defining and documenting the various aspects of the Maestro workflow engine.  Please see Part 1 for information on Maestro's Templates and Tasks, and Part 2 for the Maestro's workflow engine internals.  This post will help workflow administrators understand why Maestro for Drupal 8's validation engine warns about the potential for loopback conditions known as "Regeneration".

The Maestro Engine is the mechanism responsible for executing a workflow template by assigning tasks to actors, executing tasks for the engine and providing all of the other logic and glue functionality to run a workflow.  The maestro module is the core module in the Maestro ecosystem and is the module that houses the template, variable, assignment, queue and process schema.  The maestro module also provides the Maestro API for which developers can interact with the engine to do things such as setting/getting process variables, start processes, move the queue along among many other things.