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SAP WebFlow Made Configurable: Unifying Workflow Templates into a Configurable Model

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Business Process Management (BPM 2007)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 4714))

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Abstract

To facilitate the implementation of workflows, enterprise and workflow system vendors typically provide workflow templates for their software. Each of these templates depicts a variant of how the software supports a certain business process, allowing the user to save the effort of creating models and links to system components from scratch by selecting and activating the appropriate template. A combination of the strengths from different templates is however only achievable by manually adapting the templates which is cumbersome. We therefore suggest in this paper to combine different workflow templates into a single configurable workflow template. Using the workflow modeling language of SAP’s WebFlow engine, we show how such a configurable workflow modeling language can be created by identifying the configurable elements in the original language. Requirements imposed on configurations inhibit invalid configurations. Based on a default configuration such configurable templates can be used as easy as the traditional templates. The suggested approach is also applicable to other workflow modeling languages.

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Gustavo Alonso Peter Dadam Michael Rosemann

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© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Gottschalk, F., van der Aalst, W.M.P., Jansen-Vullers, M.H. (2007). SAP WebFlow Made Configurable: Unifying Workflow Templates into a Configurable Model. In: Alonso, G., Dadam, P., Rosemann, M. (eds) Business Process Management. BPM 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4714. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75183-0_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75183-0_19

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-75182-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-75183-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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