Workflow processing using ERP objects

Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) Systems, and Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) evolved parallel in the past. The main business drivers for automation came from the ERP world, but the WFMS solutions discovered their own way figuring out the necessity of such applications without ERP as well. In our paper we follow only the usage of workflows in ERP systems. The central elements of built-in workflows are the ERP objects, which embed and handle the business data providing real life meaning of business objects as well. The capabilities of built-in workflow systems of such ERP solutions are presented via two market-leaders: SAP and Microsoft Dynamics AX. Both solutions are dealing with ERP objects in sence of the workflow management. We recognized and present the weaknesses and restrictions of the built-in workflow systems on these two ERP examples. In our paper we describe the results of our analysis of the interoperability of the built-in workflow systems as well and demonstrate the required add-on functionalities to provide usable cross-system workflows in such an environment. We also mention the possibility of using a built-in workflow as a full-featured WFMS

Szolgáltatásorientált technológiák

Napjainkban az IT rendszerek átalakítása, működése és a későbbi gyors továbbfejlesztések kapcsán egyre többet lehet hallani a SOA módszerről. Dolgozatom célja, hogy összehasonlítsam 3 vezető szállító, az IBM, a Microsoft és az Oracle milyen eszközökkel, szoftverekkel támogatja a SOA szemlélet kialakítását és az ezek mentén működő infrastruktúra létrejöttét.M

Sistemas de workflow XML: análise e proposta de um modelo para Uni-CV

Mestrado em Engenharia Electrónica e TelecomunicaçõesEste trabalho visa apresentar um estudo sobre sistemas de workflow em que destacámos as suas vantagens, inconveniências, dificuldades na aceitação e utilização. Também estudámos as principais tecnologias de workflow XML e realçámos o Windows Workflow Foundation por ser a ferramenta utilizada para a criação do protótipo do estudo de caso. A criação deste protótipo envolveu a análise do sistema em funcionamento nos Serviços Técnicos da Uni-CV, o que proporcionou a concepção de uma aplicação que atenda às necessidades específicas e reais dessa instituição. Várias abordagens foram conceptualmente discutidas num referencial teórico para elaboração do sistema: tendo sido privilegiados os conhecimentos apreendidos durante o curso designadamente nas disciplinas: Modelação de Sistema; Sistemas de Informação Orientado ao Texto; Programação e Acesso a Sistemas de Informação e Sistemas Distribuídos. A análise do sistema foi realizada com recurso à ferramenta Visual Paradign. Para o desenvolvimento do sistema, foi utilizada a plataforma Visual Studio 2008. A base de dados que elegemos foi o Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Essas opções fundamentam-se no facto de serem tecnologias modernas e que proporcionam ao sistema uma grande fiabilidade.This work aims at presenting a study on Work flow management system focusing on its advantages, inconveniences and the difficulties found in its acceptance and use. We also studied the main technologies of workflow XML are also studied and the Windows Workflow Foundation enhanced as the tool used for the creation of the archetype of the case study. The creation of this archetype involved the analysis of the operating system of the Technical Service at Uni-CV, which provided the conception of an application that takes care of the specific and real necessities of this institution. Several approaches had been conceptually argued in a theoretical framework for the elaboration of the system which resulted in enhancing the knowledge apprehended during the course namely in the disciplines of Systems Modeling; Systems of Information Guided to the Text; Programming and Accessing Information and Distributed Systems. The analysis of the system was carried out by using the Visual Paradigm tool. For the development of the system the Visual Studio 2008 platform and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 were chosen because both are modern technologies and provide the system with great reliability

Design and Implementation of a Runtime Environment of an Object-Aware Process Management System

Contemporary business process management systems manage their processes based on the activity-centric paradigm. However, many business processes are un- or semistructured and cannot be represented adequately by the activity-centric paradigm. The fundamental reason for this insufficiency is the lack of cohesion between processes on one hand and data on the other. Object-aware process management provides a solution for this issue by tightly integrating processes with data. Data is represented as structured object types with complex data dependencies. This is mirrored in the concepts of object behavior and object interactions. Object behavior is captured in micro processes, whereas object interactions are represented by macro processes. Both micro and macro processes are integral parts of the runtime of an object-aware process management system. Furthermore, the execution of micro and macro processes is governed by process rules. The process rules advance the process state depending on the available data, react to user interactions or perform error handling. PHILharmonicFlows is a framework that aims at the proper support of object-aware processes. A prototype implementing the framework is currently under development. This thesis contributes to the prototype by describing concepts concerning process rules and by providing implementations as well. In detail, the contributions are as follows. The ongoing development of the prototype requires process rules to be easily created and altered, i.e. to enable a high maintainability. Therefore, a high level of abstraction for the process rule definitions is necessary. The Process Rule Framework enables the creation and alteration of process rules and satisfies the high maintainability requirement by leveraging functional programming devices. Using the Process Rule Framework, a high productivity can be achieved when handling process rules. Moreover, the Process Rule Framework has the possibility to be extended to a general-purpose rule engine in which rules may be created, compiled and executed during runtime. At runtime, process rules provide one of the cornerstones to object-aware process execution. This requires complex interactions between process rules, as they can trigger each other and therefore chain together. The challenge is to enable these interactions while keeping the individual process rules independent from each other and only loosely coupled. The Process Rule Manager enables the complex interactions between process rules by providing the means to coordinate and control process rule interactions. Additionally, the Process Rule Manager abstracts from the inner workings of process execution and provides a well-defined interface to interact with a micro process

Design of Universal Interface between ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and WMS (Warehouse Management System)

Import 22/07/2015Tato diplomová práce se zabývá návrhem rozhraní mezi informačními systémy ERP a WMS. Cílem práce je navrhnout integrační aplikaci zajišťující komunikaci a přenos dat mezi systémy ERP a WMS. První část této práce představuje podnikové informační systémy ERP a systémy pro řízení skladů WMS. Druhá část práce popisuje vlastnosti integrace dat, strukturu middleware a existující řešení poskytující integraci dat mezi systémy. Třetí část této práce se věnuje analýze skladových operací a jejich průběhu, které jsou společné pro systémy ERP a WMS. V této části je také naznačena komunikace mezi integrovanými systémy. Poslední část této diplomové práce se zabývá samotným návrhem a implementací integrační aplikace. Popisuje použité technologie, návrh tříd a vyřízení požadavku skladové operace.This master thesis describes the design of the interface between ERP and WMS information systems. The aim is to design an integration application providing communication and data transfer between ERP and WMS. The first part presents ERP enterprise information systems and WMS storage systems. The second part describes the characteristics of data integration, middleware structure and existing solutions providing data integration between systems. The third part of this thesis provides an analysis of warehouse operations and their workflow, which are common for ERP and WMS. In this section is also indicated communication between integrated systems. The last part of this thesis deals with the design and implementation of integration application. It describes the technology, design and processing of requirement operations from warehouse.460 - Katedra informatikyvelmi dobř

S-BPM in the Wild

This is the first book to present field studies on the application of subject-oriented business process management (S-BPM). Each case presents a specific story and focuses on an essential modeling or implementation issue, and most end with implications or suggestions for further studies. Significant variables and success factors are identified that were discovered during the respective study and lead to suggesting S-BPM novelties. For each case, the authors explain step-by-step how the story develops, and provide readers guidance by detailing the respective rationale. The studies covered are clustered according to three main S-BPM themes: Part I “Business Operation Support” documents approaches to the practical development of S-BPM solutions in various application domains and organizational settings, while Part II “Consultancy and Education Support” highlights cases that can help to train readers in S-BPM modeling and knowledge acquisition for S-BPM lifecycle iterations. It also refers to architecting S-BPM solutions for application cases based on hands-on experience. Part III “Technical Execution Support” focuses on concepts for utilizing specific theories and technologies to execute S-BPM models. It also addresses how to create reference models for certain settings in the field. Lastly, the appendix covers all relevant aspects needed to grasp S-BPM modeling and apply it based on fundamental examples. Its format reconciles semantic precision with syntactic rigor.>Addressing the needs of developers, educators and practitioners, this book will help companies to learn from the experiences of first-time users and to develop systems that fit their business processes, explaining the latest key methodological and technological S-BPM developments in the fields of training, research and application

Extending an open source enterprise service bus for multi-tenancy support

Within the Cloud computing approach, Platform as a Service is a way to provide customers with the capability to deploy acquired or consumer-created applications onto the Cloud infrastructure. It relieves these of the need to install and run their own infrastructure or to manage and control the underlying Cloud infrastructure. Whereas providers of such services try to serve as many customers as possible to exploit economies of scale, especially small and medium businesses profit from this approach, because they can save the high up front and administrative cost of installing and running their own processing systems and applications. In order to offer an Enterprise Service Bus as a proven technology known from the field of Service-Oriented Architectures as a Platform in the Cloud it has to be made multi-tenant aware. This fulfills the Platform as a Service providers' need to raise the overall utilization and to maximize revenue by serving multiple customers from one system instance. This master's thesis develops a concept to extend an Enterprise Service Bus by multi-tenancy support with respect to communication and implements this concept in an open source product. The concept and implementation are evaluated by application to a scenario originating from the European project 4CaaSt

Patterns-based Evaluation of Open Source BPM Systems: The Cases of jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark

In keeping with the proliferation of free software development initiatives and the increased interest in the business process management domain, many open source workflow and business process management systems have appeared during the last few years and are now under active development. This upsurge gives rise to two important questions: what are the capabilities of these systems? and how do they compare to each other and to their closed source counterparts? i.e. in other words what is the state-of-the-art in the area?. To gain an insight into the area, we have conducted an in-depth analysis of three of the major open source workflow management systems - jBPM, OpenWFE and Enhydra Shark, the results of which are reported here. This analysis is based on the workflow patterns framework and provides a continuation of the series of evaluations performed using the same framework on closed source systems, business process modeling languages and web-service composition standards. The results from evaluations of the three open source systems are compared with each other and also with the results from evaluations of three representative closed source systems - Staffware, WebSphere MQ and Oracle BPEL PM, documented in earlier works. The overall conclusion is that open source systems are targeted more toward developers rather than business analysts. They generally provide less support for the patterns than closed source systems, particularly with respect to the resource perspective which describes the various ways in which work is distributed amongst business users and managed through to completion