Workflow management with BPEL

An employee who is going on a business trip mails the dates and target location to a service center; somebody in the back office copies these details to various online booking portals and issues a confirmation memo. The employee then returns from the trip and enters the same data again for an expenses claim. Some clever employee might use scripting to automate this process, thereby removing the need for entering redundant information, but what happens if the company modifies the process? Will anyone take the time to rewrite all the custom scripts?

Developers often need a way to modify business processes without reinventing the underlying infrastructure. The processes are thus the interface between the productive departments and IT. At the same time, developers and administrators need to keep track of the whole system and its internal processes – a challenge for both modelers and architects.

The purpose of workflow management systems (WFMS) is to model operations independently of their implementation. The idea is to give users basic tools that map procedures to business functions, such as mail, credit card transactions, or inventory systems, without the need for legacy programming.

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