There are many applications and teams in ServiceNow today that may be participating in your business processes. Simple processes are easy enough to handle, like basic requests that require an approval and a task or two. But it gets much more complicated once different departments are involved, for example when requesting a new office setup. Multiple teams will be involved, like IT, Workplace Services, or HR for approvals.
Process Automation Designer (PAD) is a new application in Paris that will elevate your business processes to the next level. PAD is based on the technology of Flow Designer and allows you, as a business process owner, 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
Prior to the introduction of PAD, agents can easily get lost in complex processes.
- Lack of visibility: They can’t see all components, steps, and parts that make up the process. They have to drill in and out of related tasks and navigate to other parts of the platform.
- Lack of guidance: It takes quite a bit of training effort to make an agent understand which steps come next in a given process. They must analyze the forms and notes to find the right path and figure out the next steps.
- Lack of orientation: There’s no single pane of view to make out where in the process the agent currently is, and which steps are required to proceed.
In addition to agents, process owners + developers also face challenges in creating cross-departmental processes in ServiceNow.
- Hard to organize: Without PAD it requires too much ServiceNow developer expertise to connect multiple processes and services across the enterprise.
- Hard to modify: You can’t easily modify such a process and changes are being made for each use case individually.
- Hard to gain insight: There’s no single process view you can look at to understand the nested relationships between the teams and tasks involved in a service.
Vision statement for PAD
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 make use of data flow, the ability to pass data between process activities using 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 clear 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.
Our ITSM and CSM business units are building out-of-box content that will be available via the ServiceNow Store. Over time, other app teams will provide additional pre-built processes and process activities. PAD is a premium platform feature that will be initially included with CSM and IT Service Management offerings. For custom applications, App Engine entitlement is required.
Parts in PAD
Process definitions (PD) will run based on their defined trigger. Currently, triggers include records being inserted and/or updated. Re-usable trigger templates can be provided by a developer or process admin, which pre-fill the table and some of the 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 they started with, published changes will only affect newly created process executions.
In the process design space, the phases of your process are represented as lanes, which can run sequentially or in parallel. Each lane can contain one or multiple activities, which are the building blocks that make up a process and can (just like lanes) run in sequence or in parallel. 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 a number of 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 that was 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. Support for rendering multiple playbooks is coming in Quebec.
Personas in PAD
Resources
For more information on Process Automation Designer, check out these resources:
- NEW: Introduction to Playbooks and Process Automation Designer on NowLearning
- NEW: Playbooks and Process Automation Designer Fundamentals on NowLearning
- TechNow Ep 80 | Process Automation Designer/Playbook Part 1 on Oct 20, 2020
- TechNow Ep 81 | Process Automation Designer/Playbook Part 2 on Nov 17, 2020
- Break Point Podcast | Process automation Designer and Playbook on Oct 26, 2020
- NEW: K21 CreatorCon Lab CCW1007 “Elevate your process design by building cross-enterprise workflows” (updated version of CCW1001)
- PAD in our Product Documentation
- Playbooks in our Product Documentation
- Late Coding Happy Hour (LCHH) on our ServiceNow Dev Program YouTube Channel
- Get started with Process Automation Designer (PAD) & Playbooks in Agent Workspace by Maik Skoddow (Community article)
- ServiceNow Playbook Experience: The Face of the Workflow by Jon Lind on LinkedIn
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