Abstract
In recent years, it is a common phenomenon of enterprises using ERP systems to assist business management. The next goal for enterprises to practice is how an enterprise can use knowledge management to make sure that its business processes are executed correctly. For this reason, people begin to put emphases on the concept of workflow gradually. In fact, Workflow means the computerized facilitation or automation of a business process in whole or part, and a workflow system or Workflow Management System (WFMS) is which can completely defines, manages and excutes “workflow” through the execution of a software. An enterprise controls the activities of a process and dispatch its related resource well when the process is executed by the workflow system.An enterprise has to create process definitions first before using WFMS to manage its business process. A process definition is the core of a workflow system, and its main purpose is to describe the workflow model. In other words, a workflow system that can properly finish the execution of a workflow mainly depends on whether the process definitions can provide correct information. For this reason, this research proposes a build-time development procedure of a workflow system based on process definitions. The methodology of this research is composed of three phases. Phase 1 is Workflow Analysis which uses ARIS-Toolset as a business process analysis tool to build workflow models. Phase 2 is Object Classes Definition which uses a meta-model to difine the relationships and attributes of top-level entities in a process definition. Phase 3 is Process Definition which creates workflow process definitions through object concepts and uses XMI documents as a standard storage format of process definitions.Finally, this research designs a simply constructed workflow system which supports process definitions in XMI format, and then explains the development procedure using a simple business process for dealing with a purchase order. The main purpose is to prove the feasibility of the proposed methodology, inclusive of process definitions exporting to a software through XMI format and dynamic changes in the system run-time stage.