Overview

The example explained in this document is depicting a Contract management unstructured process, where any sort of contract can be driven from its request to its expiration. Since a process to thoroughly manage any kind of contract would have to consider an enormous number of situations, this process approach is rather general, relying in the tools offered by Bizagi to manipulate every case and task differently.

Scope: The process starts when a contract is required and a Contract owner creates a request which, with assessment of internal employees and defined participants (acting as representatives of the other parties of the contract), results in a released contract. Any modification to the status of the contract is supported, as well as meeting alarms and tracing. Nonetheless, this process does not support direct management of the document itself, namely terms and conditions, policies, constraints, etc.

As mentioned before, this process heavily relies on the use of Bizagi 11 features options, taking advantage of the Experience Design concept to depict an unstructured process.

Unstructured processes are those which you may catalog as highly unpredictable or dynamic, mainly because these processes may involve, at some point, a very large number of possible workflow alternatives.

It represents how the Stakeholders (knowledge workers) are able to make decisions to define the flow of a case, that cannot be predicted beforehand.

The scope of the Contract management case is the assessed release of a contract and the control of its meetings and status changes.

Through Experience Design you will be able to make the most of: Empowering knowledge workers, presenting a personalized user experience, and using contextualized BPM capabilities, among others.

Bizagi Modeler Process Description (Bpm)

The complete documentation of this process can be found within its Bizagi Modeler file (.bpm). From there, you can generate a Word document with all its information.

Identify the general process and milestones

Identify the general process, or happy path, providing a high level business description of what will be automated. Identify the most common outcomes (in this first stage do not include exceptions) and the stages of the case, or milestones.

The milestones of a Bizagi Contract management process are:

•Creation of a Contract request

•Internal assessment, approval and consent of the draft.

•Participants’ assessment and approval of the draft.

•Contract release and digital copy storage.

•Contract status update.

Not all milestones will have to be reached in a case instance. In fact, several are mutually exclusive. Some may be revocable: even when the milestone has been reached, the case stakeholders can decide that on second thoughts it is not reached after all. Furthermore, some milestones are not part of a case, but actions performed regarding the information of the contract request.

Bear in mind that the intention of every released contract is to be used by other processes, in other words, to properly control available contracts.

The statuses defined for each contract are defined in the table below:

Status	Description	Possible next status
Draft	The contract is being reviewed, and is unsigned.	Cancelled
Renewal	A previous contract has been taken as a base. The contract is being reviewed, and is unsigned.	Cancelled
In Negotiation	The contract is being negotiated with third parties.	Cancelled, Released
Released	The contract has been signed and is currently active. This means it is available to be referenced in other processes.	Expired, Cancelled, Locked
Locked	The contract is currently unavailable, despite it has not expired.	Expired, Cancelled, Released
Expired	The contract validity has expired, or the header target value is exceeded.
Cancelled	The contract has been terminated before its term ending. Therefore, is not available anymore.

Stakeholders

Bizagi 11 presents a Work portal which allows knowledge workers to make informed decisions, such as when to start a process or update data, boosting agility and productivity.

Various stakeholders can be associated with the case. However, each stakeholder may directly or indirectly influence the case. Not all stakeholders listed have to be involved with every instance of the case.

Identifying Stakeholders is important to be able to personalize their experience.

-Consenter

-Contract Owner

-Legal Area Employee

Experience design

In Bizagi Studio each Stakeholder has their experience designed in the Experience Designer menu. Each tab (Actions, My Stuff, Search) has a definition according to each user’s available options.

Keep in mind that to enable a group to be available in My Stuff section, the Stakeholder must have a Direct or indirect collection to an entity.

Thus, the Contract Owner for instance, has a collection to ContractManagement. That way, each contract owner will own one or more contracts, and will be able to view them in the Work portal, and manage them if there are actions available to manage them.

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Contract Owner experience design

Manage Stakeholders

As you download this template, make sure you have created at least one user per Stakeholder and have configured them in the Admin option of the Work Portal. If you don`t have one user per Stakeholder, this template will not work.

Go to the Admin option and for each Stakeholder create a new record, by creating a new user and filling in all additional required information.

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Keep in mind that to manage Stakeholders in the Work Portal we have already defined the management forms for them. These forms will display what information to be shown and requested when configuring a user as a Stakeholder.

In Studio we defined a Display form that depicts the columns of the Stakeholder’s main view.

And an Add and Edit form, that relate how a Stakeholder record is added and edited.

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Identify Activities, what Stakeholders can do

This involves the activities the stakeholders can initiate and other case related operations they can perform, categorizing their allowed interactions with the Work portal that will be enabled for them.

Defining if Activities are mandatory under certain circumstances or are available but executed at the Stakeholder’s discretion will help categorize an activity as an Action available as part of an unstructured process.

Many activities in a case are not always available for execution. Only when certain milestones are reached in the case or specific conditions are met, will the activity be applicable. Activities can be withdrawn: when they are no longer relevant, they should not be presented to stakeholders.

Stakeholder	Activity description	When can this action/activity be performed	Comments
Contract Owner	Create a contract	Anytime
	Request an assessment	When authoring the contract.
	Register other parties’ feedback	When evaluating the contract.
	Release contract	Once the contract is approved.
	Attach an alert	Anytime	Creates a new Contract tracking case.
	Audit contract	Anytime
Consenter	Give consent	Once all requested assessments are approved for the current contract version.	Only available for the case creator and the legal representative.
	Audit contract	Anytime
	Search contracts	Anytime
Legal Area Employee	Save a digital copy of the signed contract.	Once the contract is signed.
	Update status	Anytime	Depending on the contract status, the next status options might vary.
	Audit contract	Anytime
	Search contracts	Anytime

Identify Actions, Activities, Contexts and Data

Contract Owner

Activity description	Context	Availability	Action / Activity
Attach an alert	Always available	Through a search or My stuff. At discretion.	Action: Starts a new Contract tracking process.
Request draft assessment	When authoring a contract	Mandatory	Action: Starts a new Assess contract case.
Audit contract	Always available	At discretion	Action: Displays a form regarding the contract information.

Data description	Context	Availability	Action / Activity
Contract Management	Always	Via My stuff	Action: Opens a form to audit the contract request log.

Consenter

Activity description	Context	Action / Activity	Activity description
Consent a contract version	When a contract is approved internally, is ready for consent.	Mandatory	Activity: Draft Authoring
Audit contract	Anytime when searching contracts.	At discretion	Action: Displays a form regarding the contract information.

Data description	Context	Availability	Action / Activity
Contract Management	Always	Via My stuff	Action: Opens a form to audit the contract request log.

Legal Area Employee

Activity description	Context	Action / Activity	Activity description
Consent a contract version	When a contract is approved internally, it is ready for consent.	Mandatory	Activity: Draft Authoring
Audit contract	Anytime when searching contracts.	At discretion	Action: Displays a form regarding the contract information.
Update status	Anytime when searching contracts	At discretion	Action: Starts an update contract status process.

Processes Description

After reviewing the actions available, we can create the structure of a core process and processes that will be launched via Actions to support the case structure.

The process starts with a contract requirement. An authorized employee, as a Contract Owner, makes a contract request. Every request has a group of participants, which are external representatives of third parties implied in the contract to create; these are included in the request as well as contract type and a base contract to start working from it.

Once the contract is requested, it becomes a draft and a new version is automatically generated. Nonetheless, if the request is defined as a renewal, the “Draft” status will be replaced for “Renewal”.

When editing a draft, some assessments must be required to the members of the same company. If someone does not approve the contract version, a new version ready for edition is assigned to the contract owner. On the other hand, when the contract version is accepted, a consent from the contract owner and the legal representative of the company is mandatory before sending the draft to each participant (other parties representatives).

As soon as both consents are given, a notification to each participant is sent and various events become available for the contract owner to register the version’s feedback and approval or rejection.

Bizagi automatically checks if all participants have approved the version to continue with the contract signing and release. However, if the version was not approved by at least one participant, a new version of the contract is created ready to be edited by the Contract owner.

After it is approved, a Legal Area Employee must save a digital copy of the signed contract and the Contract owner must set the contract as “Released”. While releasing it, the contract owner can, as well, initiate alarms regarding the current version.

When released, the Contract request process is finished. Thus, every modification to the status or alarm attachment has to be done by the Legal Area Employee through Bizagi actions. These actions can be accessed using a search over the contracts.

Any alarm, which can be defined through Bizagi actions, will raise awareness about the meeting date for every party involved, and if a meeting result ought to be registered, the feedback will be stored using a connector to register it in Evernote.

Each contract will always display an action to show its request information and every status change detailed, an action to change its status (Varies per the current contract status), and an action to attach an alert (which starts the Contract Tracking) process.

Main process: Contract Management

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Sub-processes: Assess Draft

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Sub-processes: Assess Draft

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Sub-processes: Request approval and receive feedback

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Other processes (supporting processes for unstructured management):

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Figure 1:

Main facts in the Process Construction

Data Model

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The process entity of the Contract management process is “ContractManagement” which has all the attributes and relationships necessary to save main case information.

There are three Stakeholders created, that have their Experience designed to give a unique Work portal for each one:

•Contract Owner

•Consenter

•Legal Area Employee

Heritage configuration

Two types of assessments are done to the contract: internal assessments and third party assessments. Accordingly, there are two entities which inherit from the Assessment entity: Reviews and Party approval. Each of them is a process entity for its independent review process (Reviews is the process entity of the Assess Draft process and Party approval is the process entity of the Request approval and receive feedback process).

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Templates

When browsing over data, either regarding results of data searches or lists of information which are part of My stuff, you may customize the information displayed for these resulting records.

By default, Bizagi uses a basic template that chooses random attributes of the entity to which a record belongs to.

We have defined data templates for the most relevant entities: Contract Management and Person.

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Triggers and Conditional activities/events

Conditional activities are used in processes to enable or disable activities according to a data condition in the process. In this template, we use the “All approbations finished” event:

When all assessments are finished, the All approbations finished” event should be enabled, but not before.

The condition to enable or disable the conditional activity is set in the fourth step of the process wizard, Define Expressions, as show below.

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To set the ContractManagement.Currentversion.AllReviewsFinished attribute to true or false and thus enable or disable the activity, we use a Trigger.

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First, we use an expression at the end of all Assess draft processes, stating they are finished. When each of them is finished, the Trigger is launched and analyzed:

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If the assessment is indeed finished, the Trigger performs the expression Event to review if all related assessments of the contract version have been finished.

If at least one of them is not finished, the ContractManagement.Currentversion.AllReviewsFinished attribute will remain in false.

However, as soon as they are all finished, the ContractManagement.Currentversion.AllReviewsFinished attribute will be true and the All approbations finished conditional activity is enabled, continuing the process.

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Last Updated 9/28/2022 11:34:59 AM