Setting up processes

Every process is composed of one or more work steps. Work steps are the core of your processes. You’ll use work steps to define the tasks and sequences that you’d like to automate. Depending on which type of work step you use, you’ll either focus on an individual order, multiple orders or incoming items. You can add an unlimited number of work steps to your process. The following work steps are available:

Procedures are added to a work step. Use procedures to specify which actions should be performed when the process runs.

Control elements are a special type of procedure. They control how work steps, procedures and sub-procedures behave within a process. By adding control elements to a work step, you can control how individual procedures interact with each other. For example, you can repeat procedures, jump to a specific point within a work step or even create conditions that have to be met before a procedure is carried out.

Sub-procedures are added to a procedure. Use sub-procedures to specify which actions should be performed within the scope of a procedure. For example, use the sub-procedure Print to print the documents that were created by the procedure.

Once you’ve created a process, you can start adding as many work steps, procedures, sub-procedures and control elements as you want.

Sometimes processes contain faulty orders, which throw everything off track. If you don’t want such processes to be aborted completely, then you can add specific combinations of procedures and sub-procedures, which guide your process in a different direction. These procedures only run if an error occurs. For example, if you add the procedure Order with the two sub-procedures Change status and Add order notes, then faulty orders will be assigned a new status. In addition, a note will be added to the order.

Proceed as described below to copy a process.

We recommend using the export and import functions to exchange processes between different plentymarkets systems. To do so, proceed as described below.

You can download processes, e.g. from the process bazaar  or from certain pages of the plentymarkets manual. Then you can import these processes into your own system.

But keep in mind that you’ll need to modify a few system-specific settings. Watch our playful video to learn how this works.

You can find the plentymarkets process bazaar by opening up the processes  category in the plentymarkets forum. This is where sellers can share their processes with others.