SAP webflow made configurable: unifying workflow templates into a configurable model

Authors:
Florian Gottschalk;Wil M. P. Van Der Aalst;Monique H. Jansen-Vullers
Affiliations:
Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands;Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands;Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Venue:
BPM'07 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Business process management
Year:
2007

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Abstract

To facilitate the implementation of workflows, enterprise andworkflow system vendors typically provide workflow templates for theirsoftware. Each of these templates depicts a variant of how the softwaresupports a certain business process, allowing the user to save the effortof creating models and links to system components from scratch by selectingand activating the appropriate template. A combination of thestrengths from different templates is however only achievable by manuallyadapting the templates which is cumbersome. We therefore suggestin this paper to combine different workflow templates into a single configurableworkflow template. Using the workflow modeling language ofSAP's WebFlow engine, we show how such a configurable workflow modelinglanguage can be created by identifying the configurable elementsin the original language. Requirements imposed on configurations inhibitinvalid configurations. Based on a default configuration such configurabletemplates can be used as easy as the traditional templates. The suggestedapproach is also applicable to other workflow modeling languages.