Processes

A process is a sequence of work drawn onto the plan: the places where something happens, and the moves between them. Drawing it is how a layout stops being a set of rooms and starts being an argument about how the work actually flows through them.

It is the head of a small family. A process is made of steps and arrows; the routes people and goods take are Pathways; the areas the work happens in are Zones; and the room each person needs around them is a Safety Volume.

The Process Panel tile of the rail opens this tab. While it is open, only steps and arrows answer a click on the plan.

The Processes tab

  1. The two that draw on the plan. One puts down a place where work happens, the other the move between two of them.
  2. Hides every process at once without deleting anything, so the plan can be read as a plan again.
  3. The plus adds a process and puts its name straight into edit, with its colour, because a process with no name is no use to anybody. Two processes cannot share a name.
  4. One row per process: its colour on the plan, how many steps it holds on every level, an eye that takes it off the drawing on its own, and a bin that deletes it after a confirmation. Click the name or the colour to change them; the chevron lists its steps, level by level, and a step in that list takes you to it on the plan. A warning triangle here means no step of the process is a start.

What the triangle is telling you

A process needs a step marked as its start. Without one, the steps are all drawn and none of them is first, so nothing can be followed and nothing can be reported. Open the first step of the process and set its shape to Start, and the triangle goes. A step in the middle of a chain cannot be a start.

One process, every level

A process is not tied to the floor you drew it on. Renaming it, recolouring it, hiding it or deleting it reaches every level of the version at once, arrows included. That is deliberate: work that crosses two floors is still one process.

See also

  • Steps and Arrows is where each piece of a process is adjusted.
  • Zones are the areas a process runs through.