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ERP and workflow systems: do they work together?

This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of ERP and WfM systems for the purpose of management and execution of business processes. WfM systems are based on an explicit model of business processes, and they facilitate business process management. However, it is not always easy to describe all exceptional situations in an explicit way. Therefore, WfM systems may become cumbersome. Moreover, such systems assume independence of individual cases, which is seldom realistic. ERP systems lack an explicit model of business processes, and therefore it is impossible to manage business processes. However, execution of business processes is a strong point of ERP systems because the implicit business process description is an efficient way to handle exceptions. The paper investigates various ways in which ERP and WfM systems can be combined. Currently, such combinations are only workable if the granularity of WfM systems is constrained: individual actions in a WfM system should cover a complete transaction in ERP systems (or other transaction processing systems). This insight explains why WfM systems are more and more associated with Enterprise Application Integration suites. However, from a business process point of view it is illogical to have the workflow granularity determined by the accidental boundaries of transaction processing systems. Therefore, combining ERP and WfM with current state-of-the-art technology may lead to disappointing results.