Operationalize process optimization

Machinery's process optimization is even more powerful when you integrate AIP Logic. As depicted in the process optimization setup documentation, take advantage of Actions backed by LLM responses to optimize and push your process from one state to another.

When fully configured, Machinery processes can be integrated into operational applications using dedicated widgets in Workshop. While the Machinery application illustrates the process definition, the Machinery widgets show the actual state across process objects.

The two main usages of the widgets are:

• Create unique views of your process for user-specific workflows. Customize what metrics are shown and how the graph looks.
• Analyze your process and identify bottlenecks by drilling down into subsets of process objects and visualizing a rich set of metrics and node coloring.

There are two ways to integrate a Machinery process to Workshop, detailed in the following sections:

• Build a Machinery Express Workshop application: A fast one-click way to kickstart your application development with your Machinery process embedded.
• Incorporate your process into Workshop with the Machinery Process Overview widget: Integrate your process into an existing or new Workshop application.

Build a Machinery Express application

Machinery offers a way to generate a Machinery Express application that serves as a ready-to-use analysis tool that you can customize and use to build your own application. Use this feature to share the process immediately with operational users that need to be given context.

To build the express Workshop application, open your process in the Machinery application, then navigate to the Modules menu in the Overview side panel and select Create Module. The new express application will be added and linked in this area after it is generated. This application provides you with:

• A list of your relevant object types
• The ability to use filters on your process
• Select a state to see custom details (how many things are in the state, how many things are coming out, or how many things were ever in the specified state)

From here, you can review your existing process, and then navigate back to the Machinery application to reconfigure or update your processes to optimize then.

Machinery Process Overview Workshop widget

For a more manual approach, you can create a Machinery Process Overview widget in a new or existing Workshop application to view your process. Choose the Machinery resource that contains the process you want to visualize. The Ontology configuration, as well as the node positions, will be discovered from that process.

Input data

The Machinery Process Overview Widget displays a specific set of process objects. You can supply these objects through a Workshop object set variable. To ensure consistency, you should obtain the variable for process logs through a search-around from the processes.

By default, last updated at refers to the timestamp of the most recent log entry for each process object. You can choose to maintain an Updated at property on the process object type yourself if you wish to manually specify the timestamp.

Node metrics

The Machinery Process Overview widget computes a set of default metrics based on the latest state and the time it entered that state. To understand the behavior of your process objects, you can add context from other properties. You can define numerical metrics based on all properties of the process and the log object types in the Custom Metrics section.

Node and edge styling

In the node and edge styling sections, you can define the physical appearance of the process to your user.

Graph output

You can use the Machinery Process Overview widget to control other parts of your Workshop application. User interactions on the graph can either control an object set filter, or a String-type variable containing the ID of the selected element.

Live mining

Generally, you should first establish an abstract process definition, and then match the observed data against it. However, if your primary aim is to understand your log data and the journey of process entities, it might be premature to define the process in Machinery. For this scenario, Machinery offers live mining, the ability to abstract a process definition from your operational data in real time.

You have the option to leave the Machinery graph empty and create a Workshop module with a Machinery widget. We recommend using the Create module feature.

To Enable live mining, open the Machinery widget configuration in Workshop's Edit mode and toggle the option on. When live mining is enabled, Machinery will identify all states and transitions present in the log object set variable that you provide and lay out the resulting nodes. You can filter this object set to explore subsets of your data and observe in real time the processes formed by these objects.