Skins
Business Process Outsourcing enables organizations and Shared Service Centers that have several core processes to have many views of the same process typically for different products and customers. This can be achieved by using skins.
For example, an Insurance company has a core process for providing insurance quotes to customers. They then outsource this process to different smaller companies. Instead of copying the core process for each company, they can set the core process as a template and then create skins for each company; any changes to the core process are automatically applied to each skin for a customer.
Templates and skins
A template is a process of which you create different variants or skins.
The process flow always follows that of the template but within a skin you can override properties of the process, the variables and the activities.
The functionality in a skin can be changed by using embedded process activities in the template, and then overriding the process embedded in the skin.
You can use the Update PI property of the template map to automatically update the PI (Process Intelligence) database with all the job data for a skin, such as expected cost and expected duration.
Rules
Within a skin, a rule must be defined using the process data that determines the circumstances in which a skin is invoked.
When a job is created on a template, the rules for each skin are evaluated until a match is found. The matching skin is then invoked for the job.
During the lifetime of a job, the skin can be reevaluated. For example, when the data changes. This could potentially invoke a different skin, or revert the job back to the main template so no skin rule is satisfied.