You need to research Environment Locks in the system Help files. Basically an environment lock is a token that processes can compete to gain possession of. Only one process can possess the token at any one time, so it can be used to ensure 'one at a time' processing. For example, imagine 10 instances of the same process running in parallel. One of the steps in the process is to read a file and load a work queue. You would not want all 10 instances loading the queue, so an environment lock is used to ensure that only 1 instance loads the queue and the other 9 take a different route through the process.