Management of Cross-enterprise Processes based on a Service-oriented Workflow Framework

How to manage cross-enterprise processes in a flexible and efficient way has grown to be an urgent problem needed to be solved in BPM (business process management). Workflow technology is the most popular approach to enable the automation of business processes. However, traditional workflow management systems do no manage cross-enterprise processes well. This paper analyzes the characteristics of cross-enterprise processes and points out challenges for traditional workflow systems. It proposes a service-oriented workflow management system framework, which makes use of the web service technology to deal with those distributed and heterogeneous applications. This framework provides an applicable mechanism to manage cross-enterprise processes in an efficient way.