dspConduct™ Overview

dspConduct™ provides an Application Data Management solution for governing data business processes across disparate applications and infrastructures.

dspConduct™ provides the ability to design, execute, and monitor business processes within an organization as they relate to the creation and maintenance of data within the enterprise architecture of an organization. A Designer creates the governance elements hierarchy, where tasks, roles, scenarios, business processes and their dependencies are defined.

dspConduct™ enables users to manage the creation of master data. Master data is collected, validated, reviewed, approved and posted through a request process that dspConduct™ provides.  A request is comprised of tasks, roles, and scenarios within a business processes. The processes are grouped by category (e.g., Material, Customer, Vendor). Users of dspConduct™ can create their own custom applications and request pages for any object necessary. The Content WebApp is registered at the category level within dspConduct™.

A task is a Content WebApp page designed to collect and validate information required to support the business process. Not all pages are tasks as some pages can be navigated to as child pages from the main task page header. Tasks and pages can be enabled to use Microsoft Excel Interoperability so that they can create or update data for the tasks within Excel. Refer to Use Excel Integration for more information.

A role is a collection of tasks and a unit of security where an individual or groups of individuals perform their duties during a step or role within the workflow of the business process.

A scenario is a collection of roles that outlines a single sub-process that can either be an entire business process on its own or just a step within that business process, containing its own dependencies.  For example, a user can create a Basic Data for a Finished Good scenario, while other scenarios within the business process can be created to extend that same material to plants or sales organizations. 

A business process is a compilation of scenarios that allows a series of linked scenarios to be created.

A category is a collection of the tasks, roles, scenarios and business process governance elements and is created to organize the elements by the category (for example, line of business, business unit or division, or data domain).

Security setup in dspConduct™ uses positions, which are security templates defined by a Security Administrator, to which multiple users can be assigned. With positions, a Security Administrator can create a template for security once and assign multiple users to the template as needed. The position security set up is used to establish security for users in the Content WebApp.

Content WebApps use the governance elements and security setup from dspConduct™ to manage the process of coordinating data collection, validating the data and posting information. dspConduct™ also provides the ability to ensure that only resources that have been explicitly given access can create, read, update and delete data.

dspConduct™ supports mass change data to be posted via Integrate, a BackOffice Associates® component used as the posting mechanism and script repository. Refer to Integrate for detailed information.

Documents can be attached to governance elements to provide instructions and supporting documentation that communicates information to users of the governance process about how to work with certain elements. Refer to Upload and Download Element Documentation for more information.

A dashboard is available in dspConduct™ with charts that show metrics for velocity and efficiency in roles processing. Refer to View Charts in dspConduct™ for more information.

Setup and Configuration for dspConduct™

Before using dspConduct™, ensure the following tasks are completed, if applicable.

NOTE: A new data source named DGE_ElementDocument_FilePath whose data source type is “Local File” is shipped with dspConduct™. Once dspConduct™ has been installed the Path value must be populated for that DataSource. The Path value is a folder that already exists on the web server and is the “root” of the path where all Element Documents are stored on the web server.