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Design and Implementation of a Workflow Oriented ERP System

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Design and Implementation of a Workflow Oriented ERP System Design and Implementation of a Workflow Oriented ERP System B´alint Moln´ar1 and Zsigmond M´ari´as1,2 1Faculty of Informatics, E¨otv¨os Lor´and University (ELTE), H-1117 Budapest, P´azm´any P´eter s´et´any 1/C., Hungary 2LogiNet Systems Kft. H-1221 Budapest, Vihar u. 5/D., Hungary Keywords: Workflow, ERP Systems, Business Process Management, Business Process Modeling, Document Models, Data Flow. Abstract: Adaptation of enterprise resource planning systems to the frequently changing business environment and busi- ness processes require huge resources. That is why the demand was formulated for a method that enables introducing new features in software systems without any modification in program code. An adaptive ERP system cannot handle business processes and data flow as disjoint components. Therefore the proposed solu- tion is bifocal: an adaptive ERP system with highly integrated data flow and document management. In this article design and programming challenges are shown that had to be met during the development, focusing on topics of effective data storage and queries, workflow control structures and workflow evaluation techniques, document representation and the connection of workflow and data flow. 1 INTRODUCTION operation without any modification in program code would be highly advantageous. State of the art information systems used by organisa- tions in the business sector usually consist of built-in 1.2 The Idea of Workflow based software modules that implement company-specific business logic. As these organisations are constantly Systems facing new challenges, their business processes have to change frequently, therefore modifications of these The proposed workflow oriented ERP system’s capa- software systems are also often needed. bility of adaptation yields this important character- istic as the system can be intuitively adjusted to the 1.1 Regular Enterprise Software changes of business processes (Aalst and Hee, 2004). Systems It is an enterprise resource planning system focus- ing on business processes as dataflow consisting of a In the lifecycle of a software system the resources al- series of documents. The ”real life” procedures ap- located to maintenance and modification purposes of- plied by a company can be easily modeled and trans- ten exceed the costs of development and deployment formed (Becker et al., 2000) into a computationalpro- by a great margin (about 30:70%). cess. The system contains no specific business logic, Software update should follow the changes but its users can generate potentially any kind of ac- straightway because any lagging can lead to consid- tivity by the workflow components of the system. erable cost of the required human correction activ- The scope of application is not limited to the profit ity. In practice, usually the launch of any new activ- oriented business field; it also can be used in the non- ity is often synchronized with the development of the profit and public administration sector. Process ori- systems and sometimes concepts are rejected because entation is crucial in the e-Government sector, as the these developments would raise the costs too high. organizations in this field always have to comply with Traditional software systems allow parameteriza- laws and regulations. The goals and motivations are tion but new parameters will amend the system only basically different in public administration compared to fit to the foreseeable and known demands. In all to business area, but the users of the information sys- other cases the software must be modified. A soft- tems perform similar activities, i.e. creating, manipu- ware system that enables introducing new features in lating and finalizing documents. 160 Molnár B. and Máriás Z.. Design and Implementation of a Workflow Oriented ERP System. DOI: 10.5220/0005545601600167 In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on e-Business (ICE-B-2015), pages 160-167 ISBN: 978-989-758-113-7 Copyright c 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.) DesignandImplementationofaWorkflowOrientedERPSystem 2 KEY FUNCTIONALITIES OF In the workflow editor’s representation, the nodes THE SYSTEM of a workflow graph contain specific documents and queries to be executed on them. Based on the result of As an ERP system the main functionalities of the sys- the queries new documents can be defined which will tem could be summarized as follows. be created at the next node of the workflow graph, on the fly, on interpreting the flow graph. The edges of • Defining data models through a standard spread- the workflow graph connect the fields of forms within sheet interface. Each data model is defined in a documents situated in the nodes. The fields of forms separate sheet and by defining its columns and can be understood as free and valuated variables. Pro- constraints. Considering a simplified enterprise, cesses can be defined by a graphical programming examples of defined data models could be Tasks, language tool which is called a workflow editor. Items to be billed, Invoices and Demands for pay- ment; • Defining processes by placing previously defined DATA SHEET STATISTIC INSPECTION sheets on a flow diagram and specifying the flow of data. The functionality connects data flow to business processes. Considering a simplified enterprise, an example could be the Completing Task process, where changing the status of an item on the Tasks sheet to Completed creates an item STATISTIC FUELING in the Items to be billed sheet based on the corre- sponding document of the tasks sheet; Figure 1: A simple process: inspection of fuel refilling. • Assigning tasks (parts of the defined processes) to users through the process definition user interface. Within an application the workflow manager mod- Considering a simplified enterprise, an example els and implements the business logic currently effec- could be that the status of Demands for payment tive for the company by editing the processes. The should always be changed by a given user; working processes can be created or modified with- • The users are connected to the system through a out programming any change or modifications in the web interface or a mobile application. Tasks are backend of the system. The set of workflows defines given to the user to be completed based on stan- the collection of operations in the company and dis- dard forms. Considering a simplified enterprise, plays them in a visualized form. Besides, the hier- an example could be that a notification is dis- archical workflow system achieves the effective op- played in the user’s mobile application to change erations in the form of an executable program for the status of a specific Demand of payment from the Process Interpreter.The resulting flowchart can be Pending to Sent. freely drilled down and up, moreover rearranged on the workflow editor user interface (see: Figure 1). 2.1 Process Oriented Systems in Use The documents may contain a different number of data fields defined by the related document type Using a special kind of GUI, the workflow editor, a schema. Zooming in on the nodes the data fields of workflow graph is created by the workflow designer the corresponding document type will appear (see: user. The workflow designer has to be an expert con- Figure 2.). sultant, who has deep understanding of the company’s business processes, therefore is able to model them, but doesn’t need any developer skills. The workflow editor is a definition tool for busi- 3 WORKFLOW ORIENTED ness processes and it also implements an operational SYSTEM MODEL functionality: the workflow steps are to be performed by the Process Interpreter. The workflow graph ex- The main elements of the suggested workflow model hibits the feature of a graphical language that can be are nodes (states) and arrows (transitions). States of interpreted. the business process are represented by nodes, there- When the processes change, these alterations can fore nodes can be regarded as the temporary or per- be adaptively pursued by the modification of process manent results between the beginning and the end of graph only; the software code itself does not need to a given process. Tasks concerned in the process are be altered. represented by arrows. Arrows can be viewed as tran- 161 ICE-B2015-InternationalConferenceone-Business store the list of incoming arrows. To represent the INSPECTION entire workflow, it is sufficient to store the nodes and Node Type the outgoing arrows belonging to every node. Start Enter Mediate End 3.2 Classes and Objects Descrition Exact knowledge and precise observation of business processes yields the foundation of successfully oper- Result of inception... ating an organization (Khan, 2004). To precisely rep- resent and support a business process it is required to represent and handle the documents involved in and Connectors created by the process. Below we present the docu- ment model used by the proposed system. Department ID (string) The documents belong to different types. Every Document order document category has a different set of descriptive Filling person’s ID data called document attributes. Subtypes inherit all Filling ID (string) descriptive data of their parents and extend it with several additional attributes. This structure is sim- ilar to the concept of object-oriented programming, Figure 2: A process node from the workflow. where categories correspond to classes, subcategories are provided with inheritance, and each record is an object (an instance of a class). sition from one state of the process to another. Attributes are the basic elements of the model. In- We differentiate incoming and outgoing arrows. formation is stored in attributes, thus attributes can be Incoming arrows of a node is the set of arrows in the viewed as variables. Fields don’t exist above the ob- entire process that end in the given node. The set of jects’ level of abstraction they are always bound to an arrows starting in any given node is called the outgo- instance.
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