Process Automation Designer
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- UpdatedFeb 2, 2023
- 3 minutes to read
- Utah
- Process Designer
ServiceNow® Process Automation Designer enables process owners to author cross-enterprise workflows and create a single, unified process. You can also use Process Automation Designer to build the underlying processes for playbooks that Playbook Experience agents and fulfillers use.
Process Automation Designer benefits
- Connect multiple flows and actions into an end-to-end business workflow.
- Reuse existing Flow Designer flows, subflows, or actions to automate process activities.
- Organize process activities in a digitized task board interface.
- Guide agents and fulfillers through complicated playbooks from start to finish, improving customer experience and task resolution. Build your playbooks in Process Automation Designer, and then design and embed your Playbook Experience in legacy workspace. To learn more about Playbook Experience, see Set up Playbook Experiences.
- Consolidate separate business processes across the organization.
- Define a consistent record life cycle from creation to completion.
- Pass data between the activities and stages of a business process.
- Specify the conditions and the order in which activities and stages run.
- Visualize and manage the activities and stages of your process.
Creating a well-designed process
The automated business processes that you design guide your end users and help them focus on the tasks and information that matter to them. A well-designed process can do these things:
- Start up, or trigger, automatically for the types of records that your end users care about
- Reuse activities from existing Flow Designer content
- Has well-defined lanes that end users can follow for a record
- Clearly show the next steps that end users must take to move through a record's life cycle
Process Automation Designer content
Process Automation Designer has these components:
- Processes
- A process is a Now Platform® representation of a cross-enterprise business process for your organization. A process owner is responsible for creating and maintaining a process.
- Triggers
- A trigger specifies when to start running your process.
- Lanes
- A lane is a grouped sequence of activities in a process. A process owner creates a lane to specify a logical grouping of activities. A lane represents one stage in your overall business process.
- Activities
- An activity defines the Flow Designer content that powers the process's automation. An activity can also specify the user-facing experience that the process produces when it runs.
Getting started
Before you get started with Process Automation Designer, familiarize yourself with any features that your business uses to automate operations on the Now Platform, such as Flow Designer, business rules, and workflows. Learning about these concepts can help you avoid creating any conflicting logic in your processes.