基于规则的工作流系统在流程管理中的应用与研究

VIP免费

3.0 陈辉 2024-11-19 5 4 2.9MB 91 页 15积分

侵权投诉

摘要

由于全球化竞争趋势的深入，公司正开始建立工作流系统用以提高流程管理

效率和降低成本来最终最大化公司利润并且获得市场竞争力。工作流系统能够自

动化或者半自动化执行业务流程，信息，文档以及工作任务因此能够从一个参与

者传递到另外一个参与者。

然而，当前公司的业务规则都变的越来越复杂和多变。这在那些具有复杂多

变的业务规则，并且致力于业务流程管理的供应链公司身上体现的尤为突出。当

业务需求与规则发生改变后，传统的工作流系统不能灵活地改变自身的系统。他

们没有针对业务规则来设计工作流系统，因此系统呈现出静态以及不灵活的特点。

在本文的研究中，作者针对两家跨国供应链巨头进行了采访，他们是法国家

乐福亚洲全球采购部以及英国乐购公司的全球采购部，两家公司都位于上海。作

者希望通过采访来了解两家公司的业务流程以及业务流程管理中的问题。此外，

作者还讨论了公司管理业务规则的重要性以及如何建立规则库，并且探讨了基于

规则的工作流系统框架的构想以及工作流引擎和规则引擎之间应该如何协同地进

行工作。基于规则的工作流系统可以有效地解决传统工作流不灵活的问题，并且

公司内不同的部门，如业务流程管理部门，业务规则管理部门以及工作流开发团

队如何在系统开发以及维护中能各司其职且高效地工作。

本文作者通过微软公司的工作流开发组件（Microsoft Workflow Foundation）

开发出了针对业务流程管理的基于规则的工作流系统原型。此系统是基于之前调

查的家乐福全球采购部供应链业务流程再造后的业务流程进行建模并且开发的。

在原型系统中，作者建立了规则库并且成功地将业务规则与工作流系统代码分离

开，在系统运行中普通的业务流程管理人员就能通过界面来进行静态以及动态的

业务流程规则的修改。此文为那些具有复杂流程并且多变的业务规则的供应链公

司进行业务流程管理提供了参考。最后作者还为未来相关领域进一步的研究提供

了一些建议。

关键词:基于规则的工作流系统业务流程管理业务规则供应链管理

Abstract

Since the global competition is becoming increasingly severe, the organizations are

establishing workflow system to improve the efficiency and lower the cost to maximize

the profit and gain market competitiveness. The workflow system can total or semi -

automate the business processes during which the information, documents and tasks can

be passed from one participant to another for action.

However, the trends of business rules are becoming increasingly complicated and

dynamic. This is especially significant for the supply chain companies that are facing

the volatile business rules to manage business processes. The traditional workflow

systems do not provide the agility to easily change the system when the business

requirements changed. They tend to be ‘static’ and ‘in-agility’ without specifically

focusing on business rules in design. The business rules are embedded in the

programming codes and it is difficult for the system developers to update. The

traditional workflow systems cannot handle dynamic changes in business process and

especially the business rules; the system developer cannot clearly understand the

business rules; the system developer are doing the tasks which are supposed to be done

by business process team and business rules management team; the system is lacking

the design for both static and dynamic update after operations.

In the paper, the author conducted the interviews of two multinational supply chain

companies, so as to understand the business processes and problems of the business

process management of them. Moreover, the author discussed the essentiality to manage

the business rules in the company and the steps to establish the rule base. The author

also suggested the rule-based workflow system framework and how workflow and rule

engine can coordinate to each other. The Rule-based workflow system addresses

problems of ‘static and in-agility’ and different teams within the company can allocate

their tasks in high efficiency and undertake independently during the system

development and maintenance. It can reduce the cost of system maintenance and help

the business process manager to handle more tasks at the same time.

Eventually, the author developed the rule–based workflow system for business

process management (RWSBPM) based on Carrefour company’s reengineered business

processes through Microsoft Workflow Foundation. In the prototype, the author

successfully separated the business rules from the programming codes and thus the

ordinary employees can modify the business rules through web browsers in both static

and dynamic way. The paper provides the references for business process teams,

especially those within the supply chain companies that own complex business

processes and volatile business rules. They can implement the ideas of the rule-based

workflow framework and system suggested by the author in order to enhance the market

competitiveness and reduce the system maintenance cost. The paper also provides the

references for future rule-based workflow system development. The business process

management can be better implemented and documented. More importantly, they can

thus focus on the business rules which are the intangible but critical resources of the

company. Further researches have also been suggested, such as a universal standard of

rule base could be established.

Key Words: Rule-based Workflow System, Supply Chain Management,

Business Rule, Process Management

Contents

中文摘要

ABSTRACT

Chapter One Introduction .............................................. 1

§1.1 Background ................................................... 1

§1.1.1 Background Information of Workflow and Workflow System ........ 1

§1.1.2 Background Information of Business Process Management .......... 2

§1.2 Problem Description ............................................ 2

§1.3 Research Questions ............................................. 3

§1.4 Research Approaches and Contributions .............................3

§1.5 Summary of Previous Researches .................................. 5

§1.6 Outline ....................................................... 7

Chapter Two Rule-based Workflow System ................................7

§2.1 Business rule .................................................. 7

§2.1.1 Why it is essential to manage the business rules ................... 9

§2.2 Workflow Engine ............................................. 10

§2.3 Rule Engine .................................................. 12

§2.3.1 Forward Chaining Algorithm ................................. 14

§2.3.1.1 Rete Algorism ......................................... 16

§3.3.1.2 WF Algorism .......................................... 17

§2.4 Rule Base ....................................................19

§2.4.1 Rule Acquisition ...........................................20

§2.4.2 Rule Analysis ............................................. 22

§2.4.3 Rule Language Definition ................................... 23

§2.4.4 Rule Base Establishment .................................... 24

§2.4.5 Rule Maintenance ..........................................24

§2.5 Rule-based Workflow System Model .............................. 25

§2.5.1 System Architecture ........................................ 25

§2.5.2 Dynamic Modification Strategy ............................... 27

Chapter Three Application of Rule-based Workflow System in Supply Chain

Business Process Management ........................................... 29

§3.1 Establish Rule base ............................................ 30

§3.1.1 Findings and Problem Discussion ............................. 31

§3.1.2 Business Processes of the Company ............................33

§3.1.3 Rule sets ................................................. 35

§3.1.4 Rule base ................................................ 40

§3.2 Workflow Modeling of Carrefour GSA ............................ 43

§3.2.1 Modeling Approach ........................................ 43

§3.2.2 Petri net modeling ..........................................43

§3.3 Business Process Reengineering .................................. 48

§3.4 Prototype Design .............................................. 52

§3.4.1 System Development Environment and tools .................... 52

§3.4.2 Internet Structure .......................................... 55

§3.4.3 System Structure ...........................................56

§3.4.4 Functional Diagram ........................................ 58

§3.4.5 Workflow Process Design ................................... 59

§3.4.6 Database Design ........................................... 63

§3.4.7 System Service ............................................ 67

§3.4.8 Rule Management Module ................................... 68

§3.4.8.1 Static Rule Modification ................................. 68

§3.4.8.2 Dynamic Rule Modification .............................. 69

§3.4.9 System Simulation ......................................... 72

§3.5 Rational of Using Rule-based Workflow System in SCM .............. 76

§3.6 Summary .................................................... 77

Chapter Four Conclusions ............................................. 78

§4.1 Summary of the Paper .......................................... 78

§4.2 Discussion ................................................... 79

§4.3 Future Researches ............................................. 81

References ......................................................... 83

Publications ........................................................ 87

Acknowledgements .................................................. 88

Chapter One Introduction

§1.1 Background

§1.1.1BackgroundInformationofWorkflowandWorkflowSystem

Workflow is a broad concept, which refers to a series of steps that involves

decisions and rules to accomplish a certain task. A single example of workflow is

ordering the dishes at the restaurant by a customer. A customer first checks the menu,

then orders the meal he wants, the waiter takes down the order and sends to the chef.

The chef checks whether the stock meets the requirement to make the dishes what the

customer orders. If so, he will start making the dishes. Otherwise, he will tell the waiter

to modify the order. After the dishes were done, it will be served to the customer.

‘Workflow’ stems from the fields of manufacture and office automation, which a

series of procedures or tasks need to be done one step after another or the documents

need to pass from one place to the other for review or approval. Workflow Management

Coalition defines workflow as “The automation of a business process, in whole or part,

during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to

another for action, according to a set of procedural rules.” Furthermore, they define a

workflow management system as “A system that defines, creates and manages the

execution of workflows through the use of software, running on one or more workflow

engines, which is able to interpret the process definition, interact with workflow

participants and, where required, invoke the use of IT tools and applications.” (Kappel

et al. 1995, p. 11)[1] discussed that workflow management systems (WFMS) had been

introduced to design, execution and monitoring of business processes.

The market competition is becoming increasingly severe. The organizations are

establishing information system to improve the efficiency and lower the cost to

maximize the profit and gain market competitiveness. But the traditional information

systems are lacking effective mechanism and design to handle complex business

processes which involve interactions between several users. The management of

business processes of these information systems is still ‘manually’ instead of

‘automatically or semi-automatically’. Under such circumstances, the companies

especially those strongly rely on good business process management are starting to

introduce workflow management system to manage and monitor their business

processes.

The Study of Rule-based Workflow System on Business Process Management

§1.1.2BackgroundInformationofBusinessProcessManagement

Nowadays, much attention has been focused on the management methodology of

supply chain management (SCM), which integrates business processes from suppliers to

consumers and manages various tasks. (Kobayashi, Tamaki & Komoda, 2003, p.769)[2]

The retail supply chain management is an important branch of the supply chain

management. The reason why Wal-Mart is ranking the top among all the companies in

the world is because of its good supply chain management. The retail supply chain

management has the characteristics of complicated business process, as well as the

complex and volatile business rules. It is extremely important for it to have a

well-designed dynamic workflow system for its business process management.

The International Center for Competitive Excellence defined supply chain

management to be “the integration of key business processes from end user through

original suppliers that provides products, services and information that add value for

customers and other stakeholders.” (Changchien and Shen, 2002)[3] IBM company

defines the business process management as ‘To model, development and manage the

business processes during their whole life-cycles, in order to attain the company’s goal.’

§1.2 Problem Description

Due to the globalization, the businesses of the companies are tending to be

complicated. Thus, the trends of business rules are becoming increasingly complicated

and dynamic. This is especially significant for the supply chain companies. They are

facing the volatile business rules which could be updated every week or even every day.

For example, there is one rule in the supply chain states as ‘if the total volume of the

products ordered by the customer is less than 10 cubic meters, the order will be rejected

by the supplier and returned to the buyer.’ But the next day, the rules could be changed

to ‘if the total size of the products ordered by the customer is less than 8 cubic meters,

the order will be rejected by the supplier. Else if the size between 8-10 cubic meters, the

order will be accepted by the supplier but the customer will be charged extra 5% of the

total payment.’ Therefore, it arises many problems of the traditional workflow system.

It has been stated by (Royce 2007)[4] that “traditional workflow systems do not provide

the agility to easily change the system when the business requirements changed’.

The word ‘agility’ here refers to two kinds of meanings. Firstly, since the

programming codes of business rules are embedded in the whole system programming

Chapter One Introduction

codes, it is hard to maintain and update the traditional workflow systems if business

rules change frequently. Because it requires the programmers to change the source

codes of programming regularly in order to modify the volatile business rules, and thus

it may cause several problems for system maintenance. Secondly, the system developers

often do not clearly understand the complex business rules which are described and

made by business process managers. Thus, the business rules could be inaccurate or

needs lots of modifications. The reason could be that many business rules are implicit

knowledge stored in people’s mind which cannot be easily transferred into explicit

knowledge that can be depicted by the written documents and words. Another reason

could be the business rules cannot be defined at the beginning when the programmers

are doing programming. Besides that, the system developer is doing the tasks which

supposed to be done by the staff from business process team, business rule team and

system development team. Thirdly, the traditional workflow system is lacking the

mechanism that how system should response if the business rules change during the

execution of a workflow instance has started.

In all, most of the current workflow systems are ‘static’ and they cannot handle and

response to the volatile business rules very well. Thus, it is important to have a new

system framework for workflow system to be focused on business rules, in order to

have a better business process management of the company.

§1.3 Research Questions

The research questions of the paper are mainly focused on four issues. How to

establish rule base and how to maintain the rules?

1. How can rule-based workflow system to be ‘agility’?

2. How to establish rule base and manage business rules?

3. How can staff from business team and system development team to allocate

their tasks, in order to work efficiently to develop and maintain the system?

4. How can rule-based workflow system be applied in business process

management, especially in the supply chain filed?

§1.4 Research Approaches and Contributions

The author mainly completes the following tasks in the research of paper.

1. Discuss how to manage business rule and the steps to establish rule base.

2. Discuss the framework of rule-based workflow system.

The Study of Rule-based Workflow System on Business Process Management

3. Select two supply chain companies and conduct interviews.

4. Use Petri net to model workflow and implement business process

reengineering.

5. Establish the rule base.

6. Develop the system prototype to illustrate suggestions according to the

reengineered business process and the rule base.

7. Discuss the advantages the rule-based workflow system brings to the supply

chain business process management.

Main contributions of the author to the research area lie in the following aspects:

1. The author puts forward the steps to establish rule base which provides the

references for other researches.

2. The author suggests using Anecdote Circles in rule acquisition which has never

been discussed by other researches.

3. The author combines the rule-based workflow system with supply chain

business processes and develop the system prototype for a supply chain

management company, thus the paper provides the references for those

companies, especially the supply chain management companies, which own

complex business processes and volatile business rules, to better manage their

business processes and rules.

4. The author illustrates how staff from business process team, business rule

management team, system development team, database development team can

perfectly allocate their own tasks correspondingly and undertake tasks

independently in high efficiency during prototype development and

maintenance. It provides references for rule-based workflow system

development in the future for business process management, especially the

system of complex and changeable business processes; volatile and intricate

business rule; complicated database design and strict deadline. Since there are

very few researches discussing about the combination of rule-based workflow

system and the supply chain business process management, the researches and

the conclusions in the paper is valuable for the future researches.

There are several reasons for the author to select retail supply chain as the research

area of the rule-based workflow system.

Chapter One Introduction

Firstly, the retail supply chain management is an important branch of the supply

chain management. The reason why Wal-Mart is ranking the top among all the

companies in the world is because of its good supply chain management. The retail

supply chain management has the characteristics of complicated business process, as

well as the complex and volatile business rules. It is extremely important for it to have a

well-designed dynamic workflow system for its business process management.

Secondly, to satisfy and respond quickly to the requirements, many retail supply

chain companies are now focusing on supply chain management (SCM) system in order

to strengthen their ability to compete. This has therefore been recognized as an

important area for IT innovation and investment. (Bowersox and Calantone, 1995)[5]

Thirdly, from the overall perspective, the retail supply chain contains the activities

of several functional departments from different companies. Those companies could

play different roles such as the buyer, the supplier, the supply chain management

company, the third-party logistics, etc. The workflow connects these companies by the

business processes. From the individual perspective, each company in a supply chain

can be regarded as a dependent node. Each node has some business processes which

connect each other to be a workflow.

§1.5 Summary of Previous Researches

Conery, et al. (2005)[6] described data-centric software architecture for

bioinformatics workflows and a rule-based workflow system. They suggested that the

workflow system uses declarative specifications of data dependences between steps to

automatically order the execution of those steps. They also stated that the rule-based

approach supports an iterative design method for creating new workflows.

Müller, et al. (2004)[7] stated that current workflow management systems still lack

support for automatic and dynamic workflow adaptations. They further presented the

concepts and implementation of AgentWork which is a workflow management system

supporting automated workflow adaptation in a comprehensive way. Furthermore, they

suggested a rule-based approach which is followed to specify exceptions and necessary

workflow adaptations.

Chunfang and Qingping (2006)[8] discussed the disadvantage of the current

workflow model is hard to adapt to the dynamic business requirements by coding the

business rules in the business processes. They proposed a rule-based workflow

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

15 积分 4人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

摘要由于全球化竞争趋势的深入，公司正开始建立工作流系统用以提高流程管理效率和降低成本来最终最大化公司利润并且获得市场竞争力。工作流系统能够自动化或者半自动化执行业务流程，信息，文档以及工作任务因此能够从一个参与者传递到另外一个参与者。然而，当前公司的业务规则都变的越来越复杂和多变。这在那些具有复杂多变的业务规则，并且致力于业务流程管理的供应链公司身上体现的尤为突出。当业务需求与规则发生改变后，传统的工作流系统不能灵活地改变自身的系统。他们没有针对业务规则来设计工作流系统，因此系统呈现出静态以及不灵活的特点。在本文的研究中，作者针对两家跨国供应链巨头进行了采访，他们是法国家乐福亚洲全球采购部以及...

展开>> 收起<<

基于规则的工作流系统在流程管理中的应用与研究.pdf

共91页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

基于规则的工作流系统在流程管理中的应用与研究

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

推荐作者

热门标签

举报选择: