Blueworks Live

Importing a Process Blueprint from the Templates library in IBM Blueworks Live

In this article, I will introduce the Templates library of process apps and blueprints available in IBM Blueworks Live. The Templates library contains numerous process apps and process blueprints provided by IBM and other partners. The template process blueprints provide example processes patterns as well as sample process from different industries. In addition, some of the Templates represent entire process frameworks. For example, the process blueprints shown in this article are part of a process framework that comes from the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC): “APQC Classification – Operating Processes”.

THE APQC PROCESS CLASSIFICATION FRAMEWORK (PCF)® was developed by non-profit APQC, a global resource for benchmarking and best practices, and its member companies as an open standard to facilitate improvement through process management and benchmarking, regardless of industry, size, or geography. The PCF organizes operating and management processes into 12 enterprise level categories, including process groups and over 1,000 processes and associated activities. To download the full PCF or industry-specific versions of the PCF as well as associated measures and benchmarking, visit www.apqc.org/pcf.

View a process blueprint in Templates

In the IBM Blueworks Live Library, under Templates, there is a repository pre-populated with process apps and process blueprints that you can view and import. These example process artifacts make excellent starters for process work. There are sample processes from different industries including Banking, Finance, Healthcare, Human Resources, Insurance, Manufacturing, Retail, and Telecom. If you are working on a process model, instead of defining the process from scratch, you can simply import an example process from the Templates and then customize it to match your enterprise. You can use this customized example process to facilitate discussions in discovery sessions you hold with your business subject matter experts.

When you search in the Templates library, you can narrow the search results for the list of artifacts by entering a filter in the search templates field, or you can select an option from the drop down to filter by artifact type or industry.

In the example below, the text “APQC Operating” was entered in the filter field to reduce the results down to 4 from over 100.

If you hover over an artifact in the repository, you can see the description of the template artifact. In the example shown, the description indicates that it comes from the Cross Industry Process Classification Framework from APQC.

Process blueprint artifacts from the library of Templates available in IBM Blueworks Live can be previewed in both the Discovery Map view and the Process Blueprint view before they are imported.

Import a process blueprint from Templates

You can import Template process blueprints from either the artifact listing view or the artifact preview view.

Some process blueprints include associated sub-processes. When you choose to import these, you will also import all of the sub-processes, as well. In the example below, the high-level process has linked processes defined for all of the activities. When this process is imported, 18 additional sub-processes are also imported. They will all be imported together into the same space.

The imported process blueprints import as a copy in your own Space. Once the process blueprints are imported, they can be edited in the same way as any other process blueprint.

In this article, I reviewed how to view and import a process blueprint from the Templates library in IBM Blueworks Live.

If you are interested in experimenting with this feature, you can try this hands-on lab that introduces custom properties and enumerations and imports a process blueprint from the Templates library.

Check out my next posting for how to use this imported process blueprint to develop a process analysis heat map.