Embedded in the Reltio Connected Data Platform is a Business Process Management engine. We refer to this functionality simply as Workflow. This capability allows Reltio users to be notified when tasks require their participation to enrich or otherwise approve a profile action.
In this video, we review the capabilities of the Reltio Workflow engine and walk through the creation and deployment of a new workflow. Join Dan Gage, solutions consultant at Reltio, as he explains more. For more information, head to the Reltio Community and get answers to the questions that matter to you: https://community.reltio.com/home
Download the PPT here:
PPT - Reltio Workflow process design and deployment
Transcript:
Dan Gage:
Just to introduce myself, my name is Dan Gage. I am a Principal Solution Consultant. I've been with Reltio a little over six years, and I've been in the data management space for over two decades now. And I'm fairly well-versed in a number of different topics within the Reltio solution space. Today, we'll be focusing all on Reltio Workflow.
Dan Gage:
So when you think about workflow, it's often referred to as an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of activity. So when you look at the idea of really data governance and managing data quality, it's really about getting that consistency and repeatable processes around managing your data, and Reltio workflow is designed to specifically support those concepts.
Dan Gage:
So when you look at workflow in those processes, there's a number of industry standards that have evolved literally over the past two decades to provide really the infrastructure to help organizations manage these processes. So one of the first is called BPEL. It's the Business Process Execution Language. And Reltio has a full BPEL compliant workflow engine that is deployed with the Reltio platform. We actually use the Activiti workflow engine. So it is completely embedded and abstracted from you as a customer. But we want you to be aware of that because any of the documentation on the activiti.org website would be applicable to the way that you can extend and enhance any workflows within your Reltio platform. As far as building out those business processes, we do support the Eclipse plugin, the Activiti plugin for Eclipse if you choose to go that route to create custom workflows or to modify existing workflow, but Reltio does provide the business process management notation interface directly integrated to the Reltio Console.
Dan Gage:
So the significance there is, Reltio is software as a service. So we're providing to you not only the infrastructure to deliver on these workflows, but we're providing you all in the administrative and configuration capabilities delivered as part of the Reltio platform to allow you to review, define and enrich the workflow processes so that your business users can get that repeatable orchestrated series of activities.
Dan Gage:
When you look at what Reltio delivers out of the box, not only are we delivering the infrastructure to support these workflows, we're also providing a number of workflow processes that are predefined and preintegrated into the Reltio data governance interface. So the first we'll discuss is the Potential Match Review. So the idea there is that when this system has identified through the Reltio matching edge and that two records have a correlation that suggests that they could be merged together. So in building and tuning your match rules, you may have a number of rules that trigger high confidence correlations that are going to automatically merge those records together. But where you have that medium level of correlation where there needs to be a data steward that reviews it, many customers today just use the Reltio search interface and they just find and remediate those potential matches, but Reltio does provide this workflow process that allows you to trigger this email notification routing and approval around those match review processes. So we'll see an example of that shortly.
Dan Gage:
The second area that we provide an out-of-the box workflow is around data change requests. And the idea there is that any user that either chooses to initiate a data change request or is restricted by their role-based access control, that wants to make a change to a value or a relationship, can use the standard Reltio interface, but that potential change is held in a pending state while it's routed for workflow approval and review. So we provide that data change request functionality out of the box. And we'll see an example of that again.The third area that we deliver out of the box workflow capabilities is around the recommendation to delete. And we'll discuss that again shortly.
Dan Gage:
The infrastructure that we provide through the Activiti-based workflow designer gives you the ability to create custom workflows completely from scratch. And again, as part of our session today, we'll take a look at a custom workflow that is not provided by Reltio that we've developed specifically for this session today. And as you are having your business users interacting with these Reltio workflows, these notifications, it is primarily designed around increased productivity. We provide full support for mobility so that you don't necessarily have to be at your laptop or at your desk. We provide email notifications when a task has been assigned. So whatever email client, whether it's on your mobile device, your tablet, your workstation, whether you use Outlook or Gmail or Yahoo or any number of different email clients, that notification is going to come to you and provide you a template that we'll see here momentarily.
Dan Gage:
So the email notifications is one mechanism. We also provide notification on the Reltio dashboard. So as soon as you log into the Reltio application, you'll see a list of your potential tasks, as well as a full featured application interface that we call the Reltio Inbox. So looking at those question-
Chris Detzel:
Hey, Dan, we got a question.
Dan Gage:
Yeah, we got a question. No problem.
Chris Detzel:
Yeah, alrighty. Sorry about that.
Dan Gage:
Sure.
Chris Detzel:
But quickly, so for potential match review, is there a way to trigger recent potential matches so as a new potential matches are introduced, it would trigger like a workflow to the data steward?
Dan Gage:
We absolutely can do that. And I actually specifically have an example of that in a later slide.
Chris Detzel:
Okay. Cool.
Dan Gage:
So we'll address that shortly, Chris Detzel. So [inaudible], thanks for the question. And let's keep them coming. So with regard to the notification, regardless of whether it's one of the Reltio out of the box tasks, or whether it is a workflow process that you've custom developed the notification again, and it can be disabled if you choose not to have these notifications coming to your email, you can certainly turn it off. But in general, business users like to get that notification that they can go in there and search and see it in their standard email client.
Dan Gage:
They're going to get a template-based view. So it's going to give them the task that's been assigned to them. That task is a clickable link that will take them into the Reltio software. It will, of course, require them to authenticate via your standard Reltio authentication process in order for them to be able to interact and take action on that task. But we're going to guide them towards quickly and easily finding the task that they need to from the workflow. And then the information that they will see in that email notification is configurable. So that is something that we provide standard formats for those notifications, but for customers that want to customize that, it can be supported.
Dan Gage:
On the Reltio dashboard, you do have a task inbox. For many of our customers, they choose to have it in the upper right hand corner, but this is configurable. And I'll give you a quick teaser. We've got a new release coming out early next year in which end users will be able to customize and configure their own dashboard and to move these facets around and pick and choose what information is displayed under their dashboard. So that's something exciting you can look for in a future session from Reltio Product Management.
Dan Gage:
But as of today, this Task Inbox is available. It is something that if it's not already enabled in your environment, it can easily be configured and turned on through the Reltio Console, but it does provide the ability to see tasks that are assigned to you as an individual, or tasks that are assigned to one of your peers, somebody that is in an equivalent role that a task has been assigned to them that maybe if they're out of the office and you need to go in there and help remediate some of their tasks, you can get visibility through the ability to go into that task inbox and switch to your team tasks.
Dan Gage:
So that third option is the Reltio Inbox. So the way you get to that is through the Reltio menuing structure. You simply click on that and choose the Reltio Inbox, and it's going to bring up a new browser window with the Reltio Inbox application. You can bookmark this and save it to go directly to that inbox at a later date. You can access this inbox on your mobile and tablet devices. It is touch sensitive. It is mobile friendly from the standpoint that it will resize and rerender information based upon the available screen real estate.
Dan Gage:
So being able to see those tasks that are assigned to you, again, being able to see tasks assigned to other team members, tasks that you have perhaps initiated. So as you click and interact with these tasks through the Reltio Inbox, it's going to pop up this panel on the right hand side that is going to be task sensitive. So depending upon whether it's a match review task, a merger view, a delete request, you're going to get features over here that allow you to reassign or interact and approve that task based upon the type of task it is.
Dan Gage:
And within that inbox, we also support the ability to filter. So again, Reltio is focusing on productivity in giving your users that have any significant number of tasks the ability to filter, sort, find tasks, to bulk reassign groups of tasks, all these are capabilities that are supported through the Reltio Inbox. And a recent feature that we've recently enabled is the ability to define task variables within your workflow. So where you have the need to customize and segment workflow tasks based upon your own business needs, you can define task variables in your workflow. And then the users that receive those workflow task assignments would have the ability to filter and sort their tasks based upon that information.
Chris Detzel:
Hey, Dan.
Dan Gage:
So Reltio Inbox is a great and interesting. Yes, Chris Detzel.
Chris Detzel:
Quick question on that, so can we send an email for task which are post due date in the inbox so to update users like these are pending tasks which are past due date and need attention?
Dan Gage:
Yeah, so the default behavior you could see on the screen here, I've got the top task is due for me on December 10th, but I have some other tasks that are past due. So the system will automatically alert me with a different alternate color coding. So the default behavior is not to send an additional workflow or notification, but that is something that could be configured. So as part of the BPEL standard that Reltio supports and leverages, you can automatically set timeouts and you can set activity based upon your desire if you want to auto-reject or auto-approve, or just renotify a user, those are things that you could build through workflow extensions in your specific process.
Chris Detzel:
Great. Thanks, Dan.
Dan Gage:
Sure, thank. All right. Specifically, looking at some of those out of the box workflows, we're going to just double-click and drill down and talk about and get a little visibility into how this infrastructure is working. So the first and perhaps the simplest, but very valuable is just the recommendation for delete. So you can see in the upper right hand corner on the Workflow tab of the right hand panel navigation, you have a dropdown list where you can select from any workflows that are available to you as a user. And in this case, just starting the recommendation for delete is going to use a role-based assignment to notify somebody to approve that workflow.
Dan Gage:
So you see here in the green box is the out of the box workflow process that we deliver around delete review. So it's simply going to require a one step approval. If the individual who acts on that workflow task cancels the task or rejects it, then it simply will take no action and terminate the workflow, but you'll see if they accept the delete request, then it's going to invoke what's called a delete service.
Dan Gage:
So you notice that in each of these two workflow task steps, the one on the left is a human interaction step. The one on the right is what's called a service task where it's going to invoke some programmatic object to perform some functionality. So again, with the out of the box workflow tasks, Reltio has pre delivered these task functionalities to do the deletes, the merges, marking a record is not a match if you reject the merge and then applying the change with the data change request.
Dan Gage:
So we do deliver that out of the box service task functionality. But you do have the ability that if you have, so let's say you're looking to do GDPR or California Consumer Protection Compliance, and you need to have a more robust delete. So the standard delete service is going to be the standard Reltio delete, which is a soft delete, which is just going to mark the record as deleted and hidden from the user, but it's still going to be persisted within the infrastructure within the activity logs.
Dan Gage:
So Reltio platform is GDPR/CCPA compliant. So when you form a GDPR delete within Reltio, we will purge it from our data stores as well as our activity logs. But for our customers, it's important that that GDPR delete is cascaded now to other systems where that information is stored. And this is where you have the opportunity to customize and extend this out of the box delete review process to add additional steps to interact with other systems or notify additional users that there is a need to purge this customer's data from other potential systems.
Chris Detzel:
Hey, Dan, that was really good. Quick question though, for potential match reviews, can we customize as the alerts to be triggered only for certain suspect rules?
Dan Gage:
Yes. Yes. And we'll see an example of that as well.
Chris Detzel:
Perfect. So you're one step ahead everybody. That's great.
Dan Gage:
Yeah. And it's the next slide. So focusing on the data change request. And again, we'll see an example of this when we move to the demonstration. Within Reltio, depending upon your role-based access control, you may have the ability to directly edit and change a profile or relationship within a profile, but you may choose, even though you have that permission, you may want to change to go through a review process. And in that case, you can simply choose to make the change in what's called suggesting mode where the data change is suggested and sent for review and approval. But it's also possible using standard Reltio role-based access control, you may have certain users that are allowed to access the Reltio platform, but are restricted for making direct changes to the profile. So therefore, those users can be restricted to only making changes using this suggesting mode, which will automatically apply their changes through the data change request workflow process.
Dan Gage:
So it's important to note that the data change is going to take whatever proposed change the user has made, held it in a pending state until the workflow is completed. And then only upon successful completion and approval of the process, will it actually apply that change? And this data change request process works for absolutely any attribute within your data model. So whether it's a standard attribute, a nested attribute, a relationship, whether it's an attribute that Reltio delivered to you out of the box, or whether it's an attribute that you've added to your Reltio implementation through the configuration process, this data change process is dynamic and its based upon your Reltio metadata to give you the ability to review and govern those changes.
Dan Gage:
It also supports the ability that if you make multiple changes in a single data change request, then all of those changes can be held together. So here you see that I've made a change to Wanda Cole. We've added a social security number and we've added the prefix to this record. But what Reltio also supports is that through the Reltio Inbox, the business user who is tasked with reviewing this workflow can individually select to reject or approve individual lines or individual changes within that data change request. So again, this is focused on giving you increased productivity where you may choose to rather than rejecting or approving the entire data change request, the approver can automatically choose to reject or approve only select portions based upon their review and analysis.
Chris Detzel:
And so just on that slide, there's a few questions here.
Dan Gage:
Sure.
Chris Detzel:
Is it possible to build a consent workflow where example practitioners can be asked to provide certain sensitive information or deny it?
Dan Gage:
So it is potential to capture that data and to have that go through a review process. So the Reltio application is primarily targeted at individuals within your organization. So if you're looking to capture that consent from a user outside, so in this case, if you were asking Wanda Cole to provide consent information, then Wanda would not directly be interacting with the Reltio interface. You would need to provide some type of integration through a customer portal or a customer self service interface to capture that data from Wanda. But the workflow or data change request would focus upon an internal user reviewing and approving the data.
Chris Detzel:
Good. And then will GDPR or CCPA delete work when there's only one crosswalk to be deleted among many others in a profile? Looks like Steven answered that question.
Dan Gage:
Yeah, the delete is primarily going to focus on the consolidated profile. So if you have a merge-tree of multiple profiles or multiple crosswalks that have come together, the delete action is going to be applied to the consolidated record. If there's only a single crosswalk that needs to be deleted, you would need to unmerge that crosswalk first and then apply the delete request on that individual.
Speaker 3:
Do you have an out the box workflow for unmerged approval?
Dan Gage:
We do not have any out of the box workflows for unmerge. The process could be defined to build the Reltio to APIs to support it, but it's something that we found is very unique to each customer in their unmerge and review processes. So therefore, you would use the Reltio infrastructure to define that workflow based on your needs.
Speaker 3:
Sounds good. Thank you.
Chris Detzel:
Great. That's all the questions for now. Thanks, Dan.
Dan Gage:
All right. So moving into that much anticipated match review. So the only way to automatically, or at least as a business user using the Reltio interface to trigger the match review workflow is from the Reltio search screen. So it is a bulk action. So you'll see in the upper right hand corner of the search screen, you have the circle with the three dots. By selecting that action, you have the ability to request match review.
Dan Gage:
It's important to recognize that the match review is going to be applied to all the records within the search results set that you have. So if your search results set finds 100 or 1,000 records, and you perform that request match review, it's going to generate 100 or 1,000, or however many records are in that match result set, it's going to apply that workflow to... Or it's going to apply individual workflows for each match pair.
Dan Gage:
So the question was specifically around, can you trigger this workflow only for records that meet a certain match rule? And you can see here that I've performed a search and I've filtered down to only the records that have met on match rule four an exact match on first name, last name, city, and some other characteristics. In this specific case, I filtered down to a specific record by entering the entity ID for that record. Therefore, selecting only the Wanda Cole record when I initiate that match review. But if I did not have that filter for that entity ID, I would be looking at all the records that have matched on rule four that are in the City of Columbus that are of type individual. And however many records met that match criteria, it would trigger them match review.
Dan Gage:
So as a second step to that is really what's going on behind the scenes. For those of you that understand Reltio, we use what's called an API-first approach in delivering the Reltio platform. And what that means is going all the way back to 2011 when Reltio was first conceived, all the functionality that we've ever designed was first built as microservices and exposed as REST APIs. So the Reltio interface that you use on a day-to-day basis is really just an orchestration and choreography of those REST APIs, allowing you to leverage those microservices to perform the appropriate action.
Dan Gage:
So on that previous screen, when you initiated a match review, it's simply using the generate match review from Query. So you have a REST endpoint to POST. You do need to set an environment variable indicating the environment that the tenant is deployed in. And then in the body of the payload for that API, you simply indicate what is the workflow you want to launch and what is the search criteria or the filter for the records that should receive that.
Dan Gage:
So on the previous screen, you saw that we were filtering on records that met a specific match rule. Here, we're indicating that any record that has a match score between 75 and 100 should receive a match review workflow. And in our demonstration, we're going to show another example of using this automation around triggering some workflows. Are there any questions here, Chris Detzel?
Chris Detzel:
No questions.
Dan Gage:
Great. At appropriate places, I've provided links to the Reltio document to help provide you some guidance around-
Chris Detzel:
It sounds like there might be one question actually that somebody want to speak up.
Speaker 4:
Yes. So related to the request match review. So if there are 1,000 potential matches for a particular match tool, and when we click on request match review, will the email get ticket for all the 1000 reports, or it'll be one email with saying that there are 1,000 potential match reviews?
Dan Gage:
Yes, it will generate unique workflow tasks for each match pair. So if you generate the match review for a single record, but that record has three other records that are potential matches, it will still generate three workflows. And then if you have 1,000 unique records that each have one potential match, you would still get 1,000 workflow notifications and 1,000 tasks generated. So today there is no grouping or clustering of those workflow tasks unless you build a custom workflow to facilitate that.
Speaker 4:
Okay. And can we disable this email notification in case we just want to review... Like don't want to send the email, but want to trigger the workflow?
Dan Gage:
Yes, I'm fairly certain that's a standard configuration through the business process.
Speaker 4:
Okay. Thank you.
Dan Gage:
All right.
Speaker 3:
In this case, in this example of bulk triggering, so so it goes by this that tool you how the score as 70 something? Is that like standard or can be alter it?
Dan Gage:
Yeah, the search string here can be any filter condition that's accessible from the Reltio engine. So here, this assumes that you're using the scoring aspect within Reltio. So not all of our customers assign match scores to their match rules. So therefore, if you're not assigning scores, then this feature or this specific search filter would not be appropriate to you. Using one that's more specific to the rules that were triggered might be more appropriate, but it can be absolutely any filter criteria or any combination of end and/or logic across any set of data or metadata on those records.
Speaker 3:
That sounds good. So it can be anything that can pull the data that we wanted. Okay.
Dan Gage:
Correct. Exactly.
Speaker 3:
Okay. Thank you.
Chris Detzel:
So one more question, Dan is, so we have Jira ticketing to request changes among other things. Is there a way to tag a data change to request with the ticket that was raised for the request so that it appears in the activity log?
Dan Gage:
So as part of the workflow, you could use a standard Reltio attribute, and you could enrich that attribute by assigning a value to that attribute to represent the Jira ticket. So that would definitely be customization to the Reltio workflow that if you wanted that Jira ticket to be automatically generated or automatically associated with the record. Or you could simply just have the attribute there, and as part of the workflow review process, the reviewer of the workflow can manual insert the Jira number into that field. And you also have the ability to use those task variables that I suggested earlier to capture that data.
Chris Detzel:
Great. Thanks, Dan.
Steve:
Dan, this might be a chance to use Reltio integration to create an integration between Jira and workflow.
Dan Gage:
That's a great example. So as part of our demonstration, we're going to be seeing the Reltio Integration hub triggering these workflows. And as Steve points out, the Reltio Integration hub does provide integration with the Jira system. So as part of triggering that workflow, that could be part of the automation as well. So that's a great point.
Dan Gage:
All right. So moving forward, the out of the box workflows that Reltio does provide, they are accessible through the Reltio Open Community Software Repository. So at Reltio, we often refer to that as ROCS, but it is a bit bucket repository. And you've got a link here on the screen that will guide you. This is also accessible through the Reltio Documentation portal that will guide you towards these out of the box workflows that we do deliver. So if you want to take them and make changes to them, we give you the to extract those workflows, alter them, use your own versioning and source system to track your own customizations and changes, and then submitting them into the Reltio platform as part of your standard DevTest production rollout cycle.
Dan Gage:
Just as an example of a custom workflow, we do support both parallel and sequential approval. We support the ability to redirect records or processes back to a previous state. They can be rejected at any point in time. And if the user rejects it and terminates that workflow, any other users who were interacting with that workflow, it would be removed from their inbox because the termination was requested by one of the authorized users. So in that process, it's all going to be based upon your business requirements, whether you have the need to have parallel and sequential, whether you're doing role-based routing to any of a group of individuals that contain specific role, or whether it's a specific individual that you want to assign it to, this is all just a matter of you understanding your business requirements, documenting it and defining it within the Reltio interface.
Dan Gage:
So for our demonstration today, we're going to use what is potentially the simplest possible workflow. It's simply a single step where we're going to acknowledge that there a record has multiple social security numbers associated with it. So just using standard Reltio configuration, I've allowed using an Aggregation Survivorship strategy records that have multiple social security numbers will be aggregated allowing the duplicate or repeating social security numbers to be seen. And we're going to trigger a workflow here to notify a business user that they need to review these records and potentially remediate or deactivate the potential or inconsistency in the data.
Dan Gage:
So what we've done is gone into the Reltio Console. Simply dragged and dropped the workflow task into the pane here and connect the start process with that workflow task. By clicking on that task, you'll see that you'll get the gear icon here. This wrench icon gives you the ability to select what type of task this is, whether it's going to be a user task, a service task. There's also some scripting tasks and some other things that can be supported. So again, because Reltio is leveraging the activity workflow engine, any of the advanced capabilities supported by activity can be leveraged within the Reltio workflow execution process.
Dan Gage:
In defining out that workflow, there's really effectively four steps that are required in defining out that workflow. So when you look at that simple workflow that we defined here, the first step is, there's different tabs here. So the General tab, the Main tab, the Form tab and the Listener tab. I've color coded each of them here to represent in the green. In the General tab, you're simply assigning a unique identifier to the workflow process that allows Reltio to distinguish whether or not a workflow task has been initiated or whether one already exists of that type. So you'll find a unique identifier for the workflow task category.
Dan Gage:
In the main section here in red, you're going to assign the candidate groups. So you can assign a specific user where I could put in here, dan.cage.reltiocom and the workflow would always come to me. Or by using a role Reltio, will use a round robin assignment to automatically assign the task to the next appropriate user. But there are absolutely techniques where you can go through customization and write custom logic to decide how the assignment should take place. So we recently had a question through the Reltio Community from one of our customers around the ability to make the decision, who to sign it to based upon data within that profile. So that is something that could be done through a custom task assignment that would be available through a Java of customization.
Dan Gage:
But here we're just using a role user. The due date here, we're using the Activiti BPEL-based nomenclature. P2D which is basically the date that the process is created plus two dates. So whenever this workflow task is created, it will due two days later. So that's the main configuration. On the form section, there are two aspects, the form fields that need to be defined. The first is the Decision section. the second is the Validator. And you can see the examples here that we've prepopulated. And again, the out of the box will workflows that Reltio provides for data change requests and delete reviews will have these fields prepopulated, so you can copy and paste them from that existing environment.
Dan Gage:
But this just highlights that the decision form field is going to display, what are the choices the user can make in approving this workflow? So in my case, I provide only a single step that says, yes, I acknowledge that I have reviewed this task. If you want to have multiple options, such as review, reject, send to another user, and then taking appropriate action based upon the selection made, you would simply add more form variables, and those form variables would be displayed through the Reltio user interface as the business user interacted with the workflow task.
Dan Gage:
The validator gives Reltio the ability to respond to the action that was taken from that interaction through the form variable here. So again, there is a Java class. Reltio provides this out of the box for the default validator. But where you want to provide custom logic. In the approval, you could extend that class through the workflow customization. And again, in the lower right hand corner, I provide a link to the Reltio Documentation where we provide sample Java classes that you can inherit from and extend to create those customizations. Any questions at this point, Chris Detzel?
Chetan:
So it's like the-
Chris Detzel:
Go ahead, Chetan.
Chetan:
Yes. Actually the form fills all everything which you're showing right on the screen, I think intently connected with the Java class that you mentioned here, or can we change the values?
Dan Gage:
You absolutely can change the values. So they're change directly through the definition here.
Chetan:
Okay.
Dan Gage:
So if you want to perform specific custom logic based upon the decision that's being made, depending upon the logic, whether it's a matter of just routing it to a different individual based upon the selection that they've made. So on the previous screen, you saw that we said that the first user may approve it and the second user may have the option that says, I want to reject it, I want to approve it, or I want to return it. So based upon that choice, you would have three options in that form review process, and then you would be able to associate different paths with each of those selections.
Chetan:
Okay. So the ID value-
Dan Gage:
Sorry, Chetan, I didn't hear it.
Chetan:
Decision can be changed. Got it.
Dan Gage:
Yeah.
Chetan:
So ID value of this can be changed. Thank you.
Dan Gage:
Yeah, and in the session that we're going to be doing in February, I believe we'll get into a little bit more discussion around making workflows work for you and talking about some of these customization options.
Chris Detzel:
Oh, nice plugged in. So quickly on slide 13. I know it's out of the box workflow. How do you get that? It's one question, where do you go to get that?
Dan Gage:
Yeah, so the Reltio Open Sourced Community software, and it is accessible through the Reltio Documentation portal. But I know Chris Detzel, you're going to make these slides available to participants of this session and you'll be able to click on this link. It is a hot link right here in the slides.
Chris Detzel:
Okay.
Dan Gage:
That you can go to that Open Source Community repository and download those sample workflows that you can then load into the Reltio interface to change.
Chetan:
So we mean the slide 13 then?
Dan Gage:
I'm sorry. Yeah, so this is just a custom example that I've created. This one doesn't exist.
Chetan:
Okay.
Dan Gage:
If you reach out to me through the community, I do have some custom examples very similar to this that I have created that for multi-step parallel sequential approval. And I'd be happy to share this with you through the community.
Chris Detzel:
That'd be great. Yeah, just ask that question, Chetan, and I'll get Dan to push for that answer.
Chetan:
Thank you.
Chris Detzel:
That be helpful to everybody. Thank you.
Dan Gage:
All right. So just to jump into the demo session. Just to highlight what we'll be doing in the demo, I'm going to start by using the Reltio Inbox. I'm going to create a record. So I'm not going to do anything special with the creation. I'm just going to create a simple record. Then I'm going to perform a data change request on that record. And you'll see that that data change request will send a workflow notification that I'll be able to receive in my Reltio Inbox. I'll be able to selectively approve individual will changes. Once I accept and apply that data change request, I'll then just, for demonstration purposes, go in and put a delete request on that record so we can see that process happen.
Dan Gage:
In the second step of the second phase of the demo here, we're going to use the Reltio Integration hub, and I've actually built a recipe here to demonstrate the ability to use the Reltio Integration hub to trigger the locating of records that have multiple social security numbers, and then automating the triggering of that workflow process that we discussed in the previous session there. So we'll see that live here in a few minutes. Its all right.
Chris Detzel:
I love demos. I think we all do.
Dan Gage:
Just getting out a full screen mode here. And yeah, so we're going to come in here. And as I mentioned, I'm simply going to come in here and create a new contact, and I'm going to give him a name and we'll just call him Steve Smith. And we're not going to put anything sophisticated on here. We're just going to do a quick save on that.
Dan Gage:
So we've created a profile. We haven't done anything sophisticated. You'll see that the Workflow tab is up here. We have already deployed that multiple approval workflow around. I also have a two-step approval, which is similar to what we saw in the slide there. We can talk to that later. But what we wanted to focus on is the ability to initiate that data change request. So in this case, I'm going to come in and I'm going to add an age and I'm going to say that Steve is 45. And we're going to add another piece of information. Let's say his social security number as these digits.
Dan Gage:
So when I hit Suggest here, what it's going to do is, you'll see it's going to go back to the record in the previous state, but the changes that were made have been gathered together and pushed into this workflow process. And I get a popup box acknowledging that the workflow's been initiated and that we'll rerender the screen here with that task. So here it's been assigned to one of my colleagues, Gino. For demonstration purposes, I'm just going to take ownership of that task. So it's assigned to me. Once it's assigned to me, you'll see that the options that I have are going to be based upon the workflow definition. The options that I can make are visible to me here.
Dan Gage:
And again, to show this within the Reltio Inbox, I can launch that user interface. And again, you can see in the URL string here, that the Reltio Inbox could just be bookmarked and you could go directly to it from your laptop and any browser or mobile device. But here I can see that that data change request for Steve Smith has been assigned to me. It's right here on the screen. By clicking on it, it's going to extend this view here on the right hand side of the screen. I can see any additional information about the record, when it was due. If I want to change the priority, make this a high priority task, I could go in there and make those changes to it. If there were additional details that were associated, and this is where you could potentially associate that Jira task information, things like that if you define those variables.
Dan Gage:
But here you can see where I have the ability to accept or reject individual fields. So if I say I want to reject that social security number, it's going to put a strike through here. I can take the task action to now approve this. And the task approval has been executed. So if I go back into the record and simply hit the Refresh key here, we'll see that the age has been applied, but that social security number that was rejected not applied.
Dan Gage:
And then again, just for demonstration purposes, we're going to trigger that recommendation for delete. So you'll see that that comment that I added has been annotated to this record. It's been assigned to my colleague, Paul. And again, for demonstration purposes, I'll just reassign it and take ownership this task. So you'll see, I now have the option to delete, cancel the task, or I can add additional comments. And then when I accept that delete process, you'll see that it has purged the record from the system. So therefore, it's removes me from the profile screen, takes me back to the Reltio dashboard.
Dan Gage:
And if I do a refresh on the dashboard here and look at the Reltio activity log, it's important to note that all of these changes that are taking place through that workflow interface are also logged and tracked through the Reltio activity log. So here you see the creation of Steve Smith here at 11:40. I viewed the profile. I made the change where the age was added, and then I removed that profile through that workflow review. And then of course, it's triggering me back to the search result.
Chris Detzel:
Dan?
Dan Gage:
Yes, go ahead.
Chris Detzel:
One question, I think it's answered, but was, can we customize out of box workflow using the workflow modeler? And Steven said, yes, you can. Reltio recommends is to make a copy and then modify the copy. So I don't if have additional thoughts there.
Dan Gage:
Yeah, absolutely. So here's the one we're going to go into, but just for demonstration purposes, I'm going to go out and I'm going to grab that delete review. So here's the workflow that you would get from the Reltio Open Community Software Repository that you would download. This is the out of the box workflow that Reltio provides.
Dan Gage:
So you can see that by clicking on the task, it's being assigned to roll reviewer. So any user within your Reltio tenant that have role reviewer assigned to them would be potentially able to receive and approve the delete request. And then that service task as we talked about is a pre-defined Reltio service task to perform that delete. But if you wanted to do a GDPR compliant delete, and you wanted to interact with other systems, you could simply just drag in an additional service task here, set that to be a service task, and then reconfigure that flow to perform your own custom service task before the Reltio delete takes place. And you would simply go in and add in this service task, your own custom logic, the Java class, and you would effectively just inherit from the Reltio Java library and then override and extend the method to perform the task implication.
Dan Gage:
So here's a simple example of taking a Reltio out of the box workflow, and extending it. Again, we're going to go back to the multiple social security. So again, we saw the example here that it's got the review, the options that will be displayed upon the screen. Again, simply I have reviewed the task. And so what we're going to do is go in through the Reltio Interface, and I have a saved search here for records with multiple social security numbers. So you can see here where a social security number count is greater than one. So I'm using metadata of the records and I can preview it here. And I can see that I do indeed have multiple social security numbers on both of these records that's triggering them to appear.
Dan Gage:
So within the Reltio Integration hub, I've defined this recipe. I've defined it as a scheduled task. So you could schedule this to run. And again, this is... I would encourage you, if you have questions about the Reltio Integration Hub, we've done a separate webinar here, and you can certainly post questions in the community about this. But I just wanted to highlight the idea of invoking the workflow here based upon a search.
Dan Gage:
So you can see in the search filter, we're starting off, we're making a query into the relative environment and we're asking for the records that have that count social security number greater than one. And we're also looking for records that don't already have a workflow associated with them. So this is just an optimization that I've added so that if you run this task multiple times and somebody has not yet taken action on the previous workflow, it's not going to generate additional workflows for that record.
Dan Gage:
And you can see that based upon the results for whatever records are found having multiple social security numbers, we're just going to loop through them. We're going to get the entity ID from that Reltio result set. And we're simply going to invoke the Reltio API to invoke that process instance. And here we're going to invoke the create the workflow task for review multiple SSNs. So I'll simply hit the Test button here, which is going to allow the Reltio Integration Hub to trigger that process. And you'll see that it's come back. And if we look at the output, we can see that it did indeed find those same two records that we previously had in the screen. And it looped through and invoked the workflow on them.
Dan Gage:
So if I come back to these results and drill in, we'll now see that that custom workflow has been invoked and assigned to these users. So I can simply say, "Yeah, I recognize that there's some numbers in here." And maybe I'm going to come in and say, "This one's not valid and this one's not valid." So I've remediated it. So it's now down to a single, accurate information, and then I can clear that workflow process. So that concludes the prepared content. We could certainly open up to questions for the remainder of our time.
Chris Detzel:
Yeah, so should I call you Dr. Dan or is that somebody else?
Dan Gage:
[Crosstalk].
Chris Detzel:
Fair enough. Can we delete the DCR review task without accepting or rejecting it?
Dan Gage:
You can. Well, specifically, on this record, if I initiate the request for delete, if the task exists. So you're asking if you can delete the task without... You can certainly do lead it without approving it just by rejecting it. But you want to know if I can delete it without actually taking the cancel action. Was that the question?
Chris Detzel:
Yeah, without doing anything? Yeah.
Dan Gage:
Yeah, so within within the Reltio Documentation, there's absolutely the ability... Each individual workflow has a task ID. So we do have APIs. So there's not a method directly within the Reltio interface to terminate a workflow that I'm aware of other than choosing to reject, but there are APIs that will allow you to take that action.
Chris Detzel:
Okay. Chetan, and if you want to add anything or that answers the question.
Chetan:
Yeah, yeah, it answered.
Chris Detzel:
Okay. Good. Are there other questions before we got to conclude this webinar? Thoughts? Hopefully you guys liked it. There is some questions here. So let's ask them. So when an update or delete is performed as a response to a workflow, is there a relationship between the update that is reflected in the activity log and the workflow request?
Dan Gage:
That's a great question. I don't know if there is to be honest with you. I know that any change that is done is going to be logged through the workflow, I'm sorry, through the standard activity log, but I don't know that it necessarily annotate that that change was made to be a data change request. So the data change requests are absolutely going to be logged and stored within the Reltio repository. So we are going to track completed workflows. And as part of those completed workflows, if you go in and query the system and look at closed workflows or completed workflows, you would see the pending change that was associated with it. But I don't think the history... I don't think it's stored in the history log. I think it's stored with the workflow.
Chris Detzel:
Okay. And a couple more questions. Is there any way to conditionally set approvers or control which workflow is triggered based on the data being saved?
Dan Gage:
Yes. So within the documentation portal, if you go to the Workflow section, here is the full documentation. If you look at overview of workflow customizations, you'll see that there's some details here around creating custom JAR files, and it would be done as specifically through what's called a listener. So the listener, when the task is initiated, it's going to listen for the event that a task has been initiated. And then based upon that, you can have custom logic that will make the assignment. And I actually just recently posted in the Reltio Community with some details on that that we can point you back to. So if you just do a search within Reltio Community, I think you can find that response from myself.
Chris Detzel:
Yeah, and it's right there too. It's fairly new. Do we have any limitation and features for developing workflow Reltio's VS other third-party modelers?
Dan Gage:
So if you want to use a third-party modeler, that certainly should be acceptable. Reltio is using the Activiti Workflow engine, the Activiti BPEL engine. So whether you use the Eclipse, the Activiti plugin for eclipse, or whether you use just standard text editor, or whether you use a third-party editor for the BPEL as long as the BPEL that's being generated and deployed into the Reltio platform is compliant with the Activiti engine. So you could certainly work with your Reltio customer success manager to get the version of the Activiti engine that we have currently deployed to ensure that you're leveraging features that are compliant with the deployment that we have in our infrastructure.
Chris Detzel:
Great, Dan. And if you don't know who your customer success manager is, just email me directly, communitymanager@reltio.com or Chris Detzel.detzel.reltio.com So another question, and it looks like the last one maybe. Can we have process to create a custom workflow? Like what has to be considered in developing custom workflows?
Dan Gage:
Yeah, so within the Workflow editor, if you simply hit create, you'll see that I start with really a blank palette. And I'm going to jump into one that is one of the more sophisticated ones, one of my colleagues actually created it around a product review. And here you can see that we have one that's a much more sophisticated for a product onboarding sample process that somebody is going to go to an ingredient department. If they reject it, it can immediately end. If they approve it, it's going to go into a parallel approval process between marketing, packaging and pricing. But only when those three groups have taken their appropriate actions, will it then move on to the next step in which it does another parallel approval process among these administrators. But if any one of these administrators was to reject the record, it would remove it from the inbox of the others and just mark it as a terminated workflow.
Dan Gage:
But the data is physically going to be stored within the Reltio repository. Interacting with it, it can be done with the Reltio APIs. So if you use a third-party engine or you have third-party applications outside of Reltio that you want to interact with, you can simply use the service task to invoke that external job.
Dan Gage:
And we do have best practices around when you're building and deploying those custom JAR files. Reltio has processes of working with the Reltio support because again, being a SaaS provider, everything is hosted and managed by the Reltio Administrative DevOps team. So we have procedures in place in which you can deploy your own custom logic to interact with other systems.
Chris Detzel:
Great.
Dan Gage:
So again, just as a summary. The Reltio Workflow system is designed to provide repeatable patterns of activity to allow your business users to efficiently increase their productivity by taking on greater levels of tasks that can be collaboratively performed by different users across your business.
Chris Detzel:
Well summarized, Dan. That was really good. So in my comments, I did ask the audience, was this particular webinar helpful? Do you want more like it? What do you want to know about workflows? So anything that you can provide would be really great. I think this was really good and it seems like there could be some workflows shared within the community. So I think that would be really cool.
Chris Detzel:
So Chetan said webinar was perfectly crafted and was up to the mark that Reltio constantly delivers. Thanks. And getting the quality bigger from webinars to webinars as day goes on. So basically let's go deeper, let's go bigger. I love it. And so there's some excitement around the workflow stuff that Jill's going to do, and maybe you can potentially partner a little bit with them as well.
Chris Detzel:
So thank you everyone for coming. Really do appreciate it. Thank you, Dan, for the great content around workflows. That's something that the audience here has been asking for and you jumped on it. You saw it. I don't know if, I won't tell the story, but I think it was it's really good. Sandra does have one last question and this will be the last. I do think that integrating the DCR with the activity log in terms of why the change was requested would be useful. So that's just idea there.
Chris Detzel:
But again, thank you everyone for coming. I'm looking forward to next year. This is our last webinar of the year. But if you have questions around workflow and other topics, please post them to the community at community.reltio.com. And happy holidays to you and everyone else. Thank you, everyone. Take care. Thanks again, Dan.
Dan Gage:
Thank you.
#workflow #customworkflow
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