Siebel CRM - How To Call a Workflow Asynchronously?

This Article is about Siebel CRM 7.X Workflows and Runtime Events. It tells you how can we use them to our advantange.
We all want the response time of our Application to be as fast as it can and we do everything that we can to achieve that. I am going to tell you about a way which can help you to reduce the response time without actually reducing any functionality. Siebel can execute workflows in two ways.

• Synchronous
• Asynchronous

Synchronous Execution : When workflows are executed Synchronously then user gets the control back only when the workflow has finished it execution.

Asynchronous Execution: When workflows are executed Asynchronously then user gets back the control immediately and the workflow is submitted to workflow process manager (WPM) as a job to be executed. WPM then executes the job later.

Often we have a functionality where large amount of processing needs to be done on an object which user is not going to use access right now. I can explain it with an example.

When user clicks copy button on a opportunity or quote we want certain custom entities to be copied over but which user will not access at that time but later.

So, we can reduce our response time by just copying the quote or opportunity synchronously and placing the code of copying of custom entities in workflow and executing that workflow asynchronously.

There are two way to execute a workflow asynchronously

• Workflow Policy
• Runtime Event and Business Service (BS) Combination

Workflow Policy is pretty traditional method of executing a workflow process.
You create a policy. Enter the conditions Specify the workflow to be executed Generate Triggers
I wouldn’t go into details of creating a policy but I will tell you some disadvantages of using Workflow Policy

1. Slow Execution
2. Difficult to setup
3. Not Reliable and Error Prone

But from siebel 7.7 onwards we have another more robust, efficient and quicker way to do that which is Runtime Events and Business Service.