A Process is a fixed sequence of any number of activities that control the processing of a ticket. Each activity symbolizes exactly one state of a ticket, e.g. a status, a procedure or the like, in which employees have to complete certain tasks. In this way, recurring tasks, e.g. an ordering process, can be defined and compliance with company guidelines can be ensured.

A ticket that goes through the process is always in exactly one activity at a time. When the process is started, the ticket is automatically placed in the first activity. The current activity determines the rules for further processing of the ticket: which ticket actions are possible and which activities can become active next.

The use of processes is particularly useful when:

• the processing of a ticket is determined by specifications in the company.
• the use of different ticket actions during processing is to be predefined
• certain ticket activities require additional mandatory fields
• the ticket passes through different responsibilities of supporters and resources.

Note: A view grouped by processes can be created in the Tickets application to display tickets with running processes and their parallel tickets, if applicable.

The editing of processes is available to all users with the permission Define Templates or Server Administration in the configuration. Here, new processes are created or edited via menu, duplicated, deleted and structured in folders. Processes can also be imported and exported here. With the global search, processes can also be found via their name or description.

The icon at the beginning of a line indicates the type of process - either simple or with parallel tickets. The listing also shows advanced process settings: Modifiable in ticket, Share with read access and Share with read and write access.

Processes are edited in a separate dialog.

Applying processes to a ticket can be done automatically or manually. Resource empoloyees and dispatchers who have been allowed the Action Start Process can start processes during ticket editing. Automatic starting of processes is possible using the Task Planner, e.g. as soon as a new ticket has been created.

Terminating processes, i.e. the process is removed from the ticket, is usually done automatically when the process has been completed by an end activity. Resource employees and dispatchers with the Stop Process ticket action can remove a process from the ticket at any other time - the process will then be interrupted rather than run through to its end. When assigning it, care should be taken to allow this ticket action only to certain people, e.g. team leaders. Otherwise, prescribed processes could be broken.

Another option is to have processes permanently applied to tickets - even beyond the termination of the ticket. This can ensure that tickets cannot be reopened and processed further after they have been closed. Alternatively, tickets that are reactivated can remain in the process and their further processing can be controlled.

Note: A process cannot be started if

• The ticket is a slave ticket of a bundle.
• The ticket is the secondary type of an ITIL-Link.

The activities of a process are linked to each other with connections, which control the transition from one activity to the next. A trigger is selected for the connection, by default the ticket action Advance Process (Prozess weiterschalten). The display name of the ticket action can be optionally changed. In the dialog for editing a connection, one or more conditions can additionally be selected as a trigger if the process has parallel tickets.

Both the ticket actions that have been set as allowed in the activity and the connection action will be displayed to the user during ticket processing. The special feature of the connection action is that it triggers the transition from one activity to the next when executed. The tasks of the new activity are now to be processed.

Note: Process activities can also be automatically switched on. This is the case, for example, if the ticket action Email empfangen or Auftrag Reaktivieren were selected as the connection.

Important: In general, only ticket actions that the user is actually allowed to perform can be displayed in ticket editing. This also applies to the connection actions, which is only displayed in addition to the already allowed ticket actions if the current user is allowed to use them. For example, the Prozess Weiterschalten ticket action may only be used by supporters, but not by end users.

A process is, as already described, the sequence of activities in one particular ticket. With the help of parallel tickets, the execution of a certain activity - or the entire process - can be divided into self-contained activities. Thus, the agent of a ticket in a process no longer has to wait for the execution of a chain of activities by another agent, but can act simultaneously.

Parallel tickets are characterized by: their own name, their own activities as well as start conditions. The transitions of activities can also be controlled by parallel tickets when using them and are then no longer limited to executing a ticket action.

Example: In software development, there is a process for handling product changes that need to be documented. The main process describes how the development process, from analysis to implementation, test integration and documentation has to run. As soon as the test integration has been started, the documentation can be created in parallel. A parallel ticket is automatically created for this purpose. The entire process can be ended as soon as this ticket has also been processed.

In the Tickets application, supporters can see the current progress of the process at any time. The progress always shows the nearest option as the target, where either the process can be left, the ticket closed or deleted. If there are multiple options when moving on, this is displayed in the progress. This always adapts dynamically based on the possible paths.

The progress is displayed in various places:

• In the preview of a ticket.
• In the detailed view of a ticket.
• In the overview of tickets of a (sub-)view grouped by process.

Parallel tickets that have not yet been created are displayed in gray in the progress. All others are green and jump to the corresponding ticket with one click. The target flag will change from light green to dark green as soon as the process - including that of a parallel ticket - has been completed.

If a parallel ticket has not been created yet, the progress shows two icons at the beginning of the bar with descriptions of the ticket to be created:

• Ticket preview: Clicking on the clipboard-with-eye icon opens a dialog that shows the values of the ticket if it would be created at this moment.
• Start conditions: Initially shows the number of start conditions set. When hovering over the icon with the cursor, the detailed conditions are displayed.

Note: If a ticket is advanced automatically by a condition, that is yet to be fulfilled, e.g. other tickets have to be closed first, the progress shows an additional step "Waiting for conditions".

Views grouped by Process get another display level if the process defines parallel tickets. Here, the process name is listed first and then, in another group, each main ticket. This has the advantage that all tickets involved in a process and their progress can be seen at a glance in the ticket grouping.

The grouping of tickets by process is an extension of the usual Ticket View properties.