An object-oriented workflow management system

• Main Author: Hui, Samson
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/7624

Since many organizations have been facing pressure to reduce costs, to increase quality, and to provide rapid delivery of new services and products, they often resort to optimizing the way they do businesses. The use of workflow systems may improve the efficiency of an organizational process, thereby reducing costs and increasing workload capacity. It can also allow people to concentrate on value-added activities by freeing them from worrying about paper flows, filing, information tracing, and whether or not certain actions have been taken. Many workflow products, however, are fundamentally driven by vendor specifications without the support of a well-developed theoretical foundation. This thesis begins with an introduction of an Object- Oriented Workflow Model (OOWM). The OOWM extends an ontologically developed modelling method, Object-Oriented Enterprise Modeling (OOEM), by including workflow constructs with the purpose of describing the task structure of an organizational process. It also presents the architecture of an Object-Oriented Workflow Management System (OOWMS) which enacts the contents of the OOWM. Finally, based on the proposed architectural blueprint, a prototype of the workflow system was implemented, by using existing technologies, for a purchase requisition process.