Digital Process Components

The Orchestration Engine digital processes are made up of a combination of triggers and process steps. It is required to have at least a trigger in a digital process.

Triggers

Triggers are used to start new instances of a process, or resume an existing one that was paused. There are two types of triggers: events and scenarios.

Events as triggers

The digital processes can be started by external events. These events can be sent to a configured OE event-receiver endpoint, for instance about stock levels.

The list of configured events is available in the Event Registry section of the Events module. You can check the list of all the events that were created for your tenant and filter them by a display name, or by an event name.

Scenarios as triggers

You can use Make scenarios as triggers for your digital process.

Choose a scenario that is already created and visible in the list, use Create New Scenario to create a new trigger scenario, or Go to Scenarios to check for scenarios that are prepared to be used publicly or available for your team only. The Create New Scenarios and Go to Digital Processes actions open a new tab with the Make application. For example, you might use a Make scenario to perform pre-processing on the data before initiating the digital process and passing the data through.

Timer events

Timer event serves as a flexible mechanism to schedule and control execution of a digital process. It supports a variety of trigger configurations to manage diverse timing and scheduling requirements. Timer events can work both as starting triggers, when they initialize a digital process, and as the wake-up triggers placed between the digital process steps.

Process steps

Process steps are made of Make scenarios, Cloud Functions, or other digital processes that can be combined together to create one automated end to end process.

Scenarios

You can use one or more Make scenarios in a process step. If you use multiple scenarios, the process runs the scenarios sequentially according to the process plan that is prepared in a digital process, from top to bottom.

You can choose a Make scenario that is already created in Make and visible in the list in the process step. If you don't want to select an existing scenario, choose Create New Scenario to create a new process step scenario, or Go to Scenarios to check for scenarios that are prepared to be used publicly or available for your team only. The Create New Scenarios and Go to Digital Processes actions open a new tab with the Make application.

Subflows - child digital processes

If you need to create a more complex digital process, you can embed one digital process into another by adding it as one of the process steps. All the digital processes are separate processes, but they can also work together in a parent-child dependency. This is useful if you want to address a larger business use case. In such a situation, you can embed processes within one another without the need to run them separately.

Cloud Functions

A Cloud Function is a small, event-driven piece of code that runs in the cloud without requiring server management. It's designed to execute specific tasks in response to triggers like HTTP requests, file uploads, or database changes. They can be used for various purposes, such as processing real-time data, automating workflows, handling API requests, or responding to IoT events.

When used as a process step in a digital process, they allow to pass data from the process context to the selected Cloud Function so that it processes it, and when the step finishes the data comes back to the process context. You may need a proper authentication between OE and the Cloud Function Service. The execution of the digital process calls the relevant Cloud Functions defined in the process steps. The supported Cloud Functions include Azure Functions, AWS Lambdas and Google Cloud Functions.