Research Of Workflow Technology's Application In Enterprise Resource Plan Systems

Although the Traditional Enterprise Resource Planning System has provided a whole suite of modern management tools, which can aid manufacturing companies in optimizing enterprise resources utilization, integration of material stream, information stream with financial stream as well as management of their human, financial and material resources, it still fall short of enough supports for management of process oriented business such as sales order processing, audition for financials and purchase. Introducing workflow into ERP System makes it more practicable to construct software reflecting the spirit of concentrating on service for consumers and led by market, improves the flexibility of the system and helps to integrate the system with other business systems such as OA, PDM, BPR .etc. Though Research for Workflow theory and technology are hot both in domains of Enterprise Modeling and Computing Theories and some workflow based enterprise application including ERP products developed by companies abroad has came into the market, there are few native made ERP products which use workflow technology as business supporting environment. This dissertation is dedicated to the study on application of workflow technology in traditional ERP products, aiming at resolve problem facing ERP product as described above.The research roots in demands of RSI0 ERP product. The research target of the dissertation includes promoting a workflow module, which is in accord with the character of manufacturing companies' production practice, based on the knowledge of workflow theories and rules of process control in production practice of manufacturing companies, and developing a small, robust, extensible and integrable workflow subsystem according to the module.During the course of the research, we first promote a workflow model, which can suffice the need of RS10 product, referencing standards published by Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC). This module extends the basic syntax of WfMC's XPDL and give a whole set of definitions and concepts about processmodule, data/information module and organization module. Then, by combining XML and database technology with J2EE platform and adopting N tier application structure, we construct a Browser/Server structure based workflow implementation. Finally, we achieved workflow subsystem's seamless integration with RS10 ERP product in a very real sense.