SAP WebFlow made configurable : unifying workflow templates into a configurable model

To facilitate the implementation of workflows, enterprise and workflow system vendors typically provide sets of workflow templates for their software. Each of these templates depicts a variant of how a particular business process can be supported by the software. The user of such a system can save the effort of creating the models and the links to system components from scratch by selecting and activating the best fitting template. A combination of the strengths from different templates is however only achievable by manually adapting one of the templates which is cumbersome. We therefore suggest in this paper to combine the different workflow templates into a single configurable workflow template. Using the workflow modeling language of SAP’s WebFlow engine, we depict how such a configurable workflow modeling language can be created by identifying the configurable elements in the original language. Requirements imposed on configurations inhibit invalid configurations. Based on a default configuration such configurable templates can be used as easy as the traditional templates. The suggested general approach is also applicable to other workflow modeling languages.