Building a production planning process with an approach based on CIMOSA and workflow management systems

Nowadays, one of the major challenges for enterprises is to stay competitiv e in today's changing market environment. This can be supported by business process models which on one hand are consistent and adequate (requirement #1), and on the other hand can be enacted and operated in an easy, fast, st raightforward and integrated way (requirement #2). The CIMOSA architecture provides the basis for business process modelling to fulfil both of the abo ve requirements. It supports the creation of consistent process models and allows to identify almost all the information required for the development of a workflow model. These models can be implemented using one of the comme rcial workflow management systems. In this paper we present the methodology based on the CIMOSA architecture that we have developed to build a workflo w model in (C) Lotus Notes for the forecasting and production planning proc esses in a tiles manufacturing enterprise. The CIMOSA approach has also bee n used to design the necessary software applications for processing the inf ormation of the resulting worflow system. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V, Al l rights reserved.