Workflow Management Technology For Enterprises

In the last few years, our government has paid more attention to Enterprise Informationalization, and has also put massive manpower and material resources to the fields of E-Commerce (EC), Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP), Product Data Management (PDM), Customer Relation Management (CRM), Computer Integration Manufacture System(CIMS) and so on. However, the development of such information systems as E-Commerce (EC), Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP), Product Data Management (PDM), Customer Relation Management (CRM), and Computer Integration Manufacture System(CIMS) can not be sustainable without the support of workflow management technology, which has become a core technology of management information and technical information. In 1993, WfMC was established to take care of the management of workflow standardization. According to the definition of WfMC, a WFMS is a software system which can completely define and supervise workflow, and carries out the workflow instance according to the logical order of the workflow model. Along with the development of information management technology, workflow technology experienced a rapid development in the past 20-30 years. The people rely more and more on the WfMS, at the same time people have higher demand on the flexibility, stability, and interactive ability of WfMS. In recent decades, since some new technologies (like Java.net, distribution technology, J2ee technology, etc) have been applied and developed, the further development of workflow technology becomes feasible. Along with some emerging domains, it gives new energy to workflow technology. In the workflow application fields, many existing software tools integrate with the functions of workflow management, for example, SAP's R3, PTC's Wirdchill, and IBM's Smarteam etc. The number of workflow products is more than several hundreds. There have been several international standardization organizations(WfMC, OMG) that established workflow management and engineering standards. Some researchers achieved success in their studies on the workflow modeling, workflow coordination and workflow security. Workflow modeling, workflow security management, workflow instance evolution and coordinational workflow have become hot research fields. Many experts have contributed to the study of workflow technology, such as Aalst who works in the workflow modeling field, Bertino and Atluri who work in the workflow security and authorization management field, Casati and Ellis who work in workflow change and instance evolution field, Grasso and Aslst who work in the coordinational workflow field. In China, some experts (FAN YU-SHUN, etc)have made scientific research on workflow technology. However, the existing workflow technology is still not mature in timing constraint, distribution and flexibility, which becomes the bottleneck of further development of management information systems such as E-Commerce (EC), Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP), Product Data Management (PDM), Customer Relation Management (CRM), and Computer Integration Manufacture System(CIMS). Also due to this shortcoming, domestic management software products frequently encounter the wantonly attack of overseas competitor, and have lost many domestic markets. This situation is disadvantageous to our country's economical development as well as our national security. It has proved that only when the products such as ERP are established on a highly effective and powerful workflow platform, then enterprises can fully enjoy the profits that enterprise informationalization brings about. This paper surveys the existing work and application background of workflow management technology. It mainly discusses the issues of integration of workflow management system and other application systems such as PDM,ERP. Meanwhile, the paper analyzes and surveys the research status of workflow management technology. The paper emphasizes particularly on the existing work, limitation and development trend on workflow instance running monitoring, access control and workflow modeling theory. This article mainly discusses PDM and ERP which are the most important two domains of the present Enterprise Informationalization. The paper studies the workflow modeling, workflow security management, workflow instance running monitor, and the application of the integration of workflow management and PDM, ERP system. The main work of the paper is listed below:ontologies as well as process mining. Secondly, it studies the workflow modeling for PDM. In this paper, a workflow management function model has been given, which combines the product lifecycle and workflow management together. The design, running, and realization of the WfMS have been introduced too. Then, we give an example of business process of an automobile enterprise. Thirdly, it introduces the ERP management thoughts as well as the development situation, and analyzes the business process characteristics of ERP. Several typical modeling methods are compared. According to the need and characteristics in the field of ERP, and based on the meta-model given by WfMC (Workflow Management Coalition), we have developed an improved activity-network-diagram based workflow model. This improved workflow model has the mechanism of event response, and has both characteristics of the Activity Network Diagram and the Event-Driven Process Chains. This model meets the business requirements of ERP very well. It can improve the system's flexibility, simplify the difficulty of modeling, and shorten the implementation cycle. Finally, we introduce the architecture of XUANTONGFlow and the organization structure model. Some design details have been given here, namely, Event manager, Workflow Definition Tool and Workflow Engine. They are most important parts of XUANTONGFlow. Then, we present a realization instance of ERP with two methods, and subsequently comparing the two methods.