Design And Implementation Of The Workflow Engine Module Of The ERP System For Zhengzhou Steel Institute

Since the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system can really improve the management efficiency and advance the market competition, more and more enterprises now are trying to adopt ERP in their systems. Zhengzhou metal product institute of Sinosteel Corp. (referred to as "Zhengzhou institute") is one of them. The author's job during the internship at Zhengzhou institute is to help the development of that ERP system. And the author noticed that it's hard to reorganize the business logic once the ERP system is deployed, for all those logics are fixed in the software.Based on the above observation, the author proposed the idea of adopting the workflow technology into the ERP system so as to ameliorate the flexibility of ERP system. Even though there are many workflow engines ready to use, they are usually big (so as to cover all the probable functions) and difficult to be incorporated with the finished ERP systems. For seeing this, the author's major job is to build a small and flexible workflow engine so as to cater for the very need for ERP system of ZhengZhou institute.Major work can be summarized as follows:1.Following the lightweight principle, finish the design of the engine's technical architecture for Zhengzhou institute of Sinosteel Corp.;2.Design the modules like process scheduling strategy, process parser, engine routing etc.;3.Implement all the modules using J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) and XPDL (XML Process Definition Language) techniques;4.Incorporate the workflow engine into the ERP system, and the result shows that the new engine can make the system more flexible, and configurable.