Assessment of Workflow Software Tools

This research addresses problems, related to the assessment of software products, used for the design and exploitation of workflow management systems. The attention is drawn towards the assessment and comparison of such software suits. The lack of direct quantitative evaluations of the products insists to assess and compare the products. The problem solved is the minimization of the subjective influence of the experts in their personal evaluation findings. An idea to overcome this problem is to apply a common evaluation scheme, which is based on objective requirements towards the products.

2014

IRJET, 2023

Workflow management systems (WfMS) are vital tools that enhance productivity and efficiency by automating and streamlining business processes across various industries. With the increasing need for operational optimization, selecting the most suitable WfMS becomes crucial for organizations. This research paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of different workflow management systems, aiming to assist decision-makers in understanding their strengths, weaknesses, and applicability across diverse organizational contexts. The study evaluates a range of WfMS, including traditional on premise systems, cloud-based solutions, and open-source platforms. The evaluation criteria encompass user experience, customization, integration, automation, security, scalability, extant of usage, industry/domain application and size of company. The analysis is based on an extensive review of literature, case studies, and interviews with industry experts. The findings provide valuable insights into the comparative performance of various workflow management systems, outlining their specific advantages and limitations. This research aims to guide organizations in selecting an appropriate WfMS that aligns with their unique requirements, facilitating improved process automation and overall operational effectiveness. The outcomes of this study contribute to the existing body of knowledge and provide practical recommendations for WfMS selection and implementation.

Requirements Engineering, 2002

Workflow management systems are becoming a relevant support for a large class of business applications, and many workflow models as well as commercial products are currently available. While the large availability of tools facilitates the development and the fulfilment of customer requirements, workflow application development still requires methodological guidelines that drive the developers in the complex task of rapidly producing effective applications. In fact, it is necessary to identify and model the business processes, to design the interfaces towards existing cooperating systems, and to manage implementation aspects in an integrated way. This paper presents the WIRES methodology for developing workflow applications under a uniform modelling paradigm -UML modelling tools with some extensions -that covers all the life cycle of these applications: from conceptual analysis to implementation. High-level analysis is performed under different perspectives, including a business and an organisational perspective. Distribution, interoperability and cooperation with external information systems are considered in this early stage. A set of 'workflowability' criteria is provided in order to identify which candidate processes are suited to be implemented as workflows. Nonfunctional requirements receive particular emphasis in that they are among the most important criteria for deciding whether workflow technology can be actually useful for implementing the business process at hand. The design phase tackles aspects of concurrency and cooperation, distributed transactions and exception handling. Reuse of component workflows, available in a repository as workflow fragments, is a distinguishing feature of the method. Implementation aspects are presented in terms of rules that guide in the selection of a commercial workflow management system suitable for supporting the designed processes, coupled with guidelines for mapping the designed workflows onto the model offered by the selected system.

2007

Before the rise of information technology applications and tools, the work through enterprises was costly and difficult. Today, the automation of business processes help organizations to achieve their goals easily and efficiently. Workflow Management System (WfMS) is one of the most important IT applications used for managing and automation of business Processes. Workflow technology is a rich technology which is applied in different industries such as Banking, Insurance, Document Management, Health Care, Manufacturing, etc. One of the most important parts of any workflow management system is the process modeling or process definition techniques which are used to analyze, model and describe business processes. In This paper, we present an overview of Workflow Management Systems such as Basic Terminology, History, Categories, Standards and interactions with other applications. Then, we introduce a survey for current workflow modeling techniques such as Petri Nets, Event-driven Process Chains, and UML Activity Diagrams.

Workflow applications automate business processes. A common approach to the development of workflow applications usually consists of the description of the desired functionality directly followed by workflow implementation. This approach has the disadvantage that it considers mainly implementation issues and the developed application is no way related to the business process it automates. In this paper we claim that a systematic approach to workflow application development should start from the definition and understanding of the corresponding business process before proceeding to the specification and implementation of workflow applications. Along these lines, we present our experience and efforts to describe and analyze a real world business process and to design and implement corresponding workflows in a systematic way by using the formal Modified Petri Net (MPN) model for business process modeling and the commercial product FlowMark for workflow development. The advantages of this approach is also discussed.

Although it is widely accepted that workflow systems add value to business processes, no substantial research has been reported in the literature that confirms this. Most of the efforts in the field of workflow systems are devoted to issues that are relevant to the design and implementation of this type of systems. Companies have a practical need to gain insight in to what extent workflow systems improve their business processes. In this paper, we present a model that measures the added value of workflow systems to business processes. We apply the model on two real-life cases in an IT company in the Netherlands. Although our model can be advanced with regard to several issues, the application of the model on the real-life cases resulted in valuable insight with regard to the impact of workflow systems for this company. From these cases we observed that value creation by a workflow system is not something to be taken for granted.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 2010

2006

This paper presents the workflow management systems as a tool for modelling, executing and monitoring e-business processes. The automation of processes and particular the business processes is done by workflow systems. There are two main groups of workflow technologies for the specification and execution of all workflows-choreography languages and orchestration languages. An analysis of the most developed workflow technologies is presented below.

2006

In this paper a short chronology of evolution of workflow management systems is given. Classifications according to different criteria of software tools supporting modeling and execution functionalities of workflow management systems are presented. Keywords—Automation systems, business processes, web services