Linking the process environment – processing activities, assets and contracts

In the “Process environment” section of a business process you link the documents that belong to this workflow: processing activities, assets, contracts and more. The table automatically adds what belongs to the workflow indirectly through these documents, so you can see, for example, which processor your payroll depends on.

Prerequisites

• Viewing only needs the “Read” right for business processes; the table only shows entries you are allowed to read yourself.
• To link and remove documents you need the “Edit” right, and there must be no access conflict on the business process.
• Only document types your team is licensed for and that you may read are offered.

Link documents

1. Open the business process. The “Process environment” section is on the “Contents” tab, after “Responsibilities”.
2. Click “New” in the “Process environment” section.
3. Choose the “Document type”, for example “Processing activities”, “Assets” or “Data Processing Agreements (DPAs)”.
4. Tick the entries you want in the table. If needed, use “Actions” and “Select all”.
5. Click “Link”. The message “The document has been linked.” appears.

Add a dependency on another business process

1. In the “Process environment”, click “New” and choose “Business processes” as the “Document type”.
2. Choose the “Direction”: “depends on” (this process needs the selected ones) or “is required by” (the selected ones need this process).
3. Tick the processes and click “Link”. The dependency shows on both sides.

Reading the table

• The “Type / Relationship” column shows the type for assets and the direction of the dependency for business processes.
• Indented and greyed out under a linked document, marked “taken over”, are that document’s own references, for a processing activity its assets, contracts and TOMs, for example. These entries are recalculated on every visit; you can only change them on the document they come from.
• Use “Search term” and “Filter > Document type” to narrow the table down.
• To remove a link, tick it, choose “Actions > Remove link” and confirm. The documents themselves stay unchanged.

Linking and removing count as a change: an approved business process goes back to “In progress”, and the next approval creates a revision with the new process environment. The process environment also appears in the exported document. On the linked document, you find the business process on the “Relationships” tab.

Practical tip

Link the processing activities of a process first, then check the entries taken over. Systems and contracts are often complete already; you only need to link directly what appears in no processing activity, such as an asset without personal data.