ERP-RFC-002 — BPM / Workflow Engine

• Status: Stub
• Date: 2026-04-12
• Author: Koder Team
• Depends on: erp-RFC-000-architecture-overview.md, kompass-RFC-001-identity-and-org-unification.md
• Phase: 4 (BPM horizontal engine)
• Blocked by: kompass-RFC-001 (identity must land first per the ERP track convention)
• Blocks: full-lifecycle tramitação features in erp-RFC-001 (licitação), erp-RFC-003 (travel), erp-RFC-004 (fiscal), erp-RFC-005 (legal)

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Summary

A dedicated Business Process Management engine with BPMN 2.0 process design, DMN decision tables, a workflow execution runtime, human task management with form rendering, SLA timers, escalation, digital signature integration, and tramitação — the "document and decision flowing between units with despachos and pareceres" pattern that defines Brazilian public and semi-public administration.

This is the horizontal engine that every vertical in the ERP track eventually consumes for its approval chains and long-running processes. Licitação uses it for the edital → proposta → contrato → execução flow. Travel uses it for solicitação → autorização → prestação de contas. Legal uses it for matter intake → triage → work → closing. HR uses it for admissão → onboarding → confirmation → offboarding. Fiscal uses it for closing cycles and audit workflows.

The engine is distinct from platform/pipe, which orchestrates technical DAG-based data pipelines (DAG → cron → task → done). BPM is human-in-the-loop, stateful, multi-day to multi-month, with forms and signatures. Pipe and BPM are complementary; neither substitutes the other.

Name decision

Deferred to the RFC itself when it is promoted from stub to draft. Candidates to evaluate per meta/docs/stack/specs/naming/brand-score.kmd:

• rumo (pt: "course, direction")
• trama (pt: "weave, fabric of decisions")
• loom (en: tear, weaves processes)
• relay (en: hands off between stages)
• cadere (latin: "to fall into place") — not to be confused with platform/cadence (music)
• iter (latin: "path, journey")
• via (latin: "way")

Hard filters: must not collide with platform/flow (git hosting), platform/pipe (data pipelines), platform/cadence (music), platform/orbit (social), platform/cron (scheduling). Must score Brand ≥ 60 (engine target). Must not read as a generic descriptor (so workflow, process, proc are out).

Scope

In scope (MVP)

• BPMN 2.0 process designer — visual diagrammer for pools, lanes, start/end events, user tasks, service tasks, exclusive and parallel gateways, intermediate events, timers, error boundary events. Web-based canvas. Output is standards-compliant BPMN XML that round-trips with external tools.
• Execution runtime — stateful token-based engine that advances process instances through the diagram, persists state to KDB, handles retries and compensations.
• DMN 1.3 decision tables — declarative decision rules for automated branching. Decision tables are authored in a spreadsheet-like UI and invoked from service tasks or gateway conditions.
• User task inbox — per-person view of assigned tasks across all tenants, with filters (due soon, SLA risk, by process type, by tenant).
• Form rendering for user tasks — tasks that need user input reference a Form from products/horizontal/form; the BPM engine embeds the rendered form and captures the response as task output.
• Digital signature for tasks — tasks that require formal approval delegate to products/horizontal/sign for ICP-Brasil or generic signature capture.
• SLA timers and escalation — declarative timers (duration or schedule) on any task; on timeout, the configured escalation action fires (reassign, notify, auto-decide per DMN).
• Audit trail — immutable event log of every state transition, input, output, and actor, per process instance.
• Kanban board view — alternative presentation of work-in-progress across process instances, grouped by stage, filtered by tenant and unit.
• Tramitação primitive — a document (any attached entity) moves between units with events: despacho, parecer, solicitação, deferimento, indeferimento. First-class modeling of the Brazilian administrative flow idiom.
• Multi-tenant isolation — every process instance and definition is scoped to a Tenant from Kompass. User assignments resolve to Membership, not Person, so the same human can have different task queues in different tenants.

Out of scope (MVP)

• Data pipeline orchestration — belongs to platform/pipe.
• Agile issue tracking (sprints, backlogs, velocity) — possibly a submodule of BPM later, possibly a separate module. Deferred.
• Complex event processing / CEP — correlation of real-time events across many streams. Not part of BPM.
• Robotic process automation (RPA) — scripted UI automation against external web apps. A sibling tool, not BPM itself.
• CMMN (Case Management Model and Notation) — loose-flow case management as an alternative to BPMN's strict flow. Interesting but deferred; can be added later as a second process notation without rewriting the engine.

Dependencies