Software AG Designer enables you to monitor the behavior of your process instances by defining stages within your process model. A stage spans one or more steps within a process model, and you can define as many stages as you need to monitor your process behavior.

Each stage starts and ends with a milestone. Each time you add a step to a process model, it is created with a start and complete milestone as part of its configuration. You can define a stage by specifying a start milestone and a complete milestone from any step in the process. You then specify a period of time for the stage to complete.

For example, you might define a stage to monitor the process flow between the milestone at the start of step “Receive Purchase Order” and the milestone at the completion of step “Ship Product”. You can define a conditional time period for the stage to complete (for example, less than 3 days), and then take advantage of EDA event notifications that result from the stage behavior.

Stage behavior is evaluated by Process Tracker, a component of the webMethods Optimize analytic engine. Process Tracker evaluates stage behavior and emits the following process stage events depending on the stage behavior: