ProcessModel 7 is not a point release. The application was rebuilt from the ground up, and the change runs all the way down: a new canvas to draw on, artificial intelligence that turns a plain description into a model that actually runs, a report that reads your results and names the one change worth making, and a simulation engine reworked for accuracy you can trust. Here is what is new, grouped by what it lets you do.
A ground-up ProcessModel
Open ProcessModel 7 and the first thing you notice is the canvas. A time-aware Welcome screen greets you and puts your demo models and recent work one click away, and from there the canvas guides your hand.
Helper lines line up your shapes as you drag them, a light grid keeps spacing even, and connections attach to the nearest border and steer around anything in the way. A color-coded minimap, alignment tools for center, middle, and even spacing, and an Arrange menu that gathers the layout commands keep even a large diagram tidy. Your model opens framed and centered in the window every time, so you never open a file to an empty canvas and go hunting for your shapes, and the look of your routes, their corner rounding and spacing, now saves with each model and comes back the way you left it.
Build with AI, rebuilt
The hardest shape in any model is the first one. Build with AI removes it. Describe your process in plain words, paste in the notes you already have, or bring in a diagram you already drew, and you get a working model, not a bare outline.
Before it draws a single shape, Build with AI studies how your kind of operation usually runs, so the first model already reflects the way your industry works. Where you did not spell something out, it fills the gap with researched timings, resources, staffing, and shifts, and it lists the assumptions it made beside the model rather than stopping to ask you up front. Building the model and refining it now happen in one window, and you watch each research table appear as the model takes shape.
Most important, the model runs when it reaches you. Every build checks its own work against the rules the simulation enforces, for times, routes, resources, and shifts, and repairs what it finds before you ever press Run. Times come out realistically uneven, with most steps finishing quickly and a few running long, arrivals rise and fall with the rhythm of the day, and where a step takes longer or heads a different way depending on the kind of item, that difference is captured in a decision table instead of being blended into a single average.
You choose the intelligence behind it, too. Point ProcessModel at a cloud provider, or at a model running on your own computer, and the setup respects your internet access and your security policy.
Analyze with AI, and a report that names the fix
Running a simulation was never the hard part. Reading it was. The ProcessModel 7 Output Report opens with the answer instead of a wall of numbers.
The report opens with the answer
An Overview names your constraint in plain language: which step, how busy it is, how many waited and for how long. Above the tabs, a five-question guide walks you from whether you can trust the run all the way to what happens if you change it, and a trust banner tells you whether to believe the numbers, with the replications and confidence intervals behind them, before you read a single one.
The Bottlenecks tab ranks every wait point by the time it costs and reads each queue’s weekly pattern to name the cause. A daily surge that drains by evening calls for peak-hour staffing, while a queue that never empties means real undercapacity, and the suggested experiment follows from the pattern rather than from guesswork.
When entity types behave differently, two-minute calls sitting next to hours-long escalations, times and costs split by type instead of averaging into a figure that describes no one. A My KPIs tab holds the statistics you care about, each one ready as a scenario comparison, and an Experiments tab weighs your scenarios and says in words what improved, what it cost, and where the constraint moves to next.
AI Analysis, ready when you are
The AI Analysis tab reads your results and writes the insight in words, highlighting what matters across throughput time, quantities processed, cost, process efficiency, and resource use. The evidence is assembled while the run finishes, so the answer to why a step is the constraint is prepared the moment you ask. Every threshold that decides what counts as a bottleneck lives in a rules file you can edit, and the report re-evaluates at once, with nothing to run again.
Results the rebuilt engine can stand behind
A report is only as honest as the engine under it, and that engine was reworked. An activity’s Operation, Waiting, Blocked, and Idle percentages now add up to 100, and time held behind a closed schedule or a full station reads as its real share of scheduled time instead of climbing past 100 percent. Time an item spends stuck behind a full station lands in its own wait and non-value-added time, so its buckets add back up to the throughput time and process efficiency reflects a line that is genuinely blocking.
Time units are honored everywhere: a day expression returns days, a one week delay runs for a week, and a time value the app cannot read stops the run and names the field instead of guessing. Take a resource in one activity and free it in a later one and the hold lasts the whole way between, so utilization reads true. Big models run fast and report honestly, because a change to a variable now wakes exactly the work that watches it: condition-based routing that once crawled runs in seconds with identical results, and a scenario that fails now fails the run instead of reporting a clean success. And you can read every replication on its own, expanding a tracked variable to see each run’s chart, or averaging a variable across every replication with an optional median, a min and max, a standard deviation, or a 90, 95, or 99 percent confidence band.
Build a daily arrival pattern from your own data
Real demand is not a flat trickle. It has a rhythm, busier on some weekdays than others, with peaks at certain hours. ProcessModel 7 builds that rhythm straight from your own history.
Copy a column of date and time stamps out of a spreadsheet, with an optional priority column beside it, and paste it straight in. A hundred thousand rows load without a stall. The importer reads how many arrivals came in on each weekday, fits a distribution to each one, and builds an hour by hour curve from the actual arrival times, and you can accept its choice or pick a different fit for any day. It reads the dates people really have: an afternoon time written as 2:30 PM, year-first dates, and day-first or month-first files detected from the file itself rather than from your regional settings. List the holidays, outages, and one-off events you know were not normal and they come out of the analysis, alongside an automatic outlier filter that is on by default.
Then it shows you the data behind the pattern. A chart lays out each weekday’s share of the week, opening a single day magnifies its week to week variation many times over, and a table lists the weekly numbers by their actual week start dates. Your imported data stays with the model, so reopening a pattern later brings every chart back, still live and still adjustable. Start from a ready-made industry pattern, name and save the patterns you build, and plan for growth by entering the arrivals you expect in a year, or a demand percentage, and watching the whole week rescale to match while holding its shape. Best of all, the calendar is finally honored: Monday’s arrivals fall on Mondays, and daily totals no longer quietly round short.
Inventory: take, store, and reorder
ProcessModel 7 models stock as carefully as it models flow.
A step can take from or store into an inventory, and the quantity can be a fixed number, a variable, an attribute, or a formula, so an order sizes itself from the entity in hand. Inventory refills itself during the run: set a reorder level, a reorder quantity, and a lead time, and stock replenishes on its own, with no separate arrival to wire up. Lead time can be a distribution or a formula, so ordinary supplier variability, early on one order and late on the next, shows up in your stock levels and stockouts instead of hiding inside a single tidy average.
Choose how each item reorders, a fixed quantity or back up to a target level, let long-lead items keep several orders in flight at once, and let a take fall back to a substitute when your first choice is out of stock. A delivery into a full warehouse waits for room, so trucks queue to unload rather than vanishing. The report then closes the loop for every item: fill rate, backorders, time out of stock, units turned away when storage was full, the value of the stock on hand, and the holding and ordering cost each item ran up, all of it carried into saved results and side-by-side scenario comparisons so you can weigh stocking policies the way you weigh everything else.
Caseload, shifts, and calendar-accurate schedules
Work happens on a calendar and a clock, and ProcessModel 7 respects both.
Put an activity on a shift
Assign a schedule on an activity’s Shift tab and work only enters and runs during the scheduled hours, so a station that is staffed for part of the day behaves that way in the model. Choose what happens when the shift ends: finish what is already started and hold the rest, pause a task partway and resume it exactly where it left off next shift, or work past the end to clear the queue before going off. Decide whether waiting work waits for the next shift or leaves, and set a short start-up delay at the beginning of each shift. On the canvas the activity grays out when it is off shift, and the report bases its utilization on scheduled time so the number reads true.
Schedule connections that follow the calendar
Draw as many schedule connections from one activity as you need, one per weekday or several to the same destination with different windows. When a connection is closed, finished work holds at the activity where you can see it and everything behind it waits in the input queue, filling on screen through the closed day, then releasing at a steady pace when the window opens. Nothing crosses a closed window and nothing is lost. The week starts on your Start Day, so a Monday-only schedule on a model that starts on a Tuesday first opens the following Monday, and that holds for schedule connections, resource shifts, and activity shifts alike. A schedule that can never open, no days chosen or a calendar that does not exist, stops the run and names the connection instead of quietly staying open around the clock.
Caseload, assigned and visible
Give a case its own worker who handles it on every visit, and set two limits per worker: how many active cases they can hold, and how much total workload, where each case can carry its own weight by something like patient acuity. Admission can hold a case in line for a worker’s free capacity without pulling that worker off what they are already doing, and when a shift ends its open cases move to the incoming shift automatically. Point an assignment at a whole group and it picks whoever is on shift with the most room, in proportion to each worker’s limits, so small peak-time teams are protected on their own. Open the Track Board during a run to watch caseloads the way a charge nurse reads the wall: every worker’s load against both limits, who is next in line, and exactly what is holding them up.
Scenarios, without touching the model
Scenarios let you ask a question without changing your model. Adjust arrivals for a scenario as a new interval, a new quantity, the volume you expect across a year, or a percentage more demand, or turn an arrival off entirely to see the operation without it. Gates and inventory settings can be overridden per scenario too, and the base model stays exactly as it was while the report compares the runs side by side.
Smarter routing on a cleaner canvas
Routing in ProcessModel 7 keeps a busy diagram readable and moves work exactly where you mean it to go.
Routes steer around the elements in their way instead of crossing through them, and they re-route the moment you move a shape. Two routes meeting at one element fan apart instead of stacking on top of each other, corners are gently rounded, and hovering a route highlights it by dimming the rest so you can grab the one you mean even where lines overlap. An Arrange menu gathers the layout commands, with settings for the spacing between parallel routes, how rounded the corners are, and whether routing steers automatically or draws plain lines you shape by hand. When a route would stretch clear across the diagram, send it off-page and it collapses to a matching labeled marker at each end.
Routes carry more than direction now. Assign a resource to a move the way you assign one to an activity, a forklift to carry a load, or a driver and a truck seized together, and the item waits for the resource before it travels. A Decision element gives a branch point the classic diamond shape, with no delay by default so it never holds work up. A Transition point joins two different kinds of route directly, so a route that splits off new items can feed straight into one that attaches them without a filler step between. And the logic you write on a route works the way you would expect: Wait Until, Get, Use For, and Route To all hold or move the item correctly on a connection, in queue logic, and in a Process Table row, and a text condition compares the words with or without quotation marks.
30 ready-to-run demo models
The fastest way to learn what ProcessModel can do is to open a model that already works.
ProcessModel 7 ships thirty ready-to-run models across six industries, spanning healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, contact centers, government, and defense. Each one is built around a single clear problem and the one change that fixes it: an ENT clinic whose hour-long waits turn out to be about exam rooms rather than doctors, a distribution center where whole orders wait on one slow pick zone, a drive-thru where a single large order jams the lane, a disability hearing office whose months-long backlog traces to the decision desk downstream.
Open File > Demo Models to pick an industry down the left side or browse them all at once, or open one of the featured demos straight from the Welcome screen with a single click. Every demo opens as an unsaved model, so you can run it, change it, and save your own copy anywhere while the original stays pristine for the next time. And every card carries a Brief: the business the model is drawn from, the problem it faced, the evidence in the report, and the one change that fixed it, so you understand the story before you open the model or press Run.
Action Logic and Process Tables
The tools for writing model logic grew up in ProcessModel 7.
Create attributes and variables without leaving your logic
Type a name that does not exist yet and a small marker appears on the Action Logic field. Click it once and the name is created, with its type worked out from how you used it: counting up gives a whole number, a decimal value gives a decimal, and text in quotes gives a list of values that fills in from everywhere you use that name. Nothing is created without your click, a name one character away from an existing one is offered as a correction rather than a duplicate, and anything created can be undone straight afterward. Models you did not build yourself, imported or made by AI, show their undeclared names the same way, ready to add, and pressing Run while names are still missing offers to add them and run instead of handing you a list of errors. The editor’s suggestions, hover help, and signatures were refreshed across the board, arrays now support increment and decrement on any single cell and fill in the right number of indices for a multi-dimensional array, and a Time delay written into your logic pauses the entity and then continues from the next line, so timed sequences and loops keep their pace.
Process Tables that capture a real decision
A Process Table row now takes a full condition instead of a single test, combining attributes and variables with AND and OR, high-acuity patients and a waiting room holding more than fifteen, built with the same visual editor you already use on routes. Tables match on an entity’s own properties, its type, id, group quantity, age, and time in system, and matching ignores capitalization so a small difference in spelling still connects. Duplicate a row to spin off a variant in one click, then change only the part that differs. As you type in the Action Logic editor your defined tables are offered along with a Define Process Table action, hovering a table’s name previews how it decides which row applies, and clicking it jumps straight to the table.
Sign in, Student Edition, and automatic updates
The pieces around the modeling got easier too.
Sign in with your email address
Sign-in opens in your web browser, and ProcessModel now comes to the front on its own as soon as the browser confirms you are signed in, with the license window already showing your account. The address on your account is all you need.
Student Edition, straight from the textbook
Students pick the chapter they are studying from the Welcome screen and the app opens ready to follow along, so the model in front of them matches the one in the book. A built-in tutor answers questions from that chapter and keeps its help tied to the material at hand, a guided practice mode walks through set exchanges one step at a time, and after a run a side-by-side comparison lays the student’s results next to the numbers printed in the textbook and says whether they match. Every chapter’s targets are verified against the book before each release.
Updates that install themselves, and big runs that finish
ProcessModel keeps itself current: open the Help menu, choose Check for Updates, and a newer version installs with one click and restarts on the new version. And the largest models now deliver their results. A year-long run that used to finish the simulation and then stall at the very end opens its report the moment the run completes, and with animation turned off a big run finishes faster while still delivering every number the report reads.
See it for yourself
That is the shape of ProcessModel 7, and it is still only the highlights. For the full version-by-version history, every feature and fix in order, read the complete changelog. When you are ready to build your own model, start a free trial, or get in touch if you would like a walkthrough first.
