Creating business calendars

Users from various regions or business units of your organization may adhere to different work hours, and schedules. To enable workflow timers to use actual working hours, and holidays, you can create custom business calendars that reflect these different work schedules. All the timers using business days, and business hours will use the business calendar associated with the process template.

Users with the required permission sets can create calendars based on regional work schedules, country-specific holidays, or other unique time constraints. A process designer can then use the Process Builder application to select a specific calendar for an entire process or for a specific activity. In this way, timers for a process are calculated based on actual work hours.

When you create a new calendar, you can select an existing calendar, and use it as a basis for creating another calendar, making the necessary modifications to the new calendar.

You can also create different time periods within a calendar for ease of administration. For example, you can create a calendar for the Western Region for the years 2008 through 2009. The calendar can have two different periods of time on the Periods tab-a time period within 2008, and a time period in 2009. Each period of time can be edited separately, and can have its own starting, and ending times, work days, and non-working days.

Note

If you edit a calendar that is being used in a running or paused workflow, the timer expiration dates are recalculated based on the modified calendar.

To create a new calendar:

  1. Select Tools > Workflow > Calendar.

    The Calendars page appears with a list of calendars that exist within the repository.

  2. Select File > New > Business Calendar.

  3. To base the new calendar on an existing calendar, select the calendar name from the Base calendar list.

    The default is None.

    If the calendar is being used in a process, the system displays the process name in the Process list.

  4. Type a name, and a description for the calendar.

  5. Click Next to display the Periods page where you create separate periods of time.

  6. Type a name for the group.

  7. Select a Start date, and End date for this event.

  8. Select a Start time, and an End time for the days that fall within the category of working days.

    Select Use same time for all checked days to set a time for one of the working days, and use it for the selected days.

  9. To identify a day as a Non-working day, select it from the pop-up calendar control, and click Add.

    The date appears in the list of non-working days. To Edit or Delete the date, select it from the list, and click the link to edit or delete.

  10. Click Next to display the Details tab, and the list of events that are associated with the calendar.

    On the Details tab, you can add, edit, and delete events.

  11. Click Next to display the Permissions tab.

    superuser or users with the bpmuser role can create or delete a business calendar. Any user can edit the calendar.

  12. Click Finish.

    The system saves the calendar to the /System/Workflow/Calendar folder.

To delete a calendar:

  1. Select Tools > Workflow > Calendar.

    The Calendars page appears with a list of calendars that exist within the repository.

  2. Right-click the calendar, and select Delete.

    Note

    The system will not delete a calendar that is referenced in any process definition.

To edit a calendar:

  1. Select Tools > Workflow > Calendar.

    The Calendars page appears with a list of calendars that exist within the repository.

  2. Right-click the calendar, and select Properties.

  3. The calendar definition opens, enabling you to edit the calendar details.