Daniel, Yes there is. We did not expose it in the drools-api because it should probably not be used as a preferred solution, because it could lead to you changing process instance data in the middle of the process execution, create confusion if you have nested variable scopes, etc. In general, work item nodes and event nodes could also be used to insert new data into the process. If you cast your process instance to an internal class, you can use the following code: org.drools.process.instance.ProcessInstance processInstance = ... VariableScopeInstance variableScopeInstance = (VariableScopeInstance) processInstance.getContextInstance(VariableScope.VARIABLE_SCOPE); variableScopeInstance.setVariable(name, value); I've also added this method to WorkflowProcessInstanceImpl, so if you can update to the latest trunk, you can simply do: RuleFlowProcessInstance processInstance = ... processInstance.setVariable(name, value); Kris Quoting Daniel Miller <dmiller(a)versatile.com&gt;: Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm