Process Configuration

Abstract

The Order Fulfillment process of Genko Oil was set up based on recommendations from the Voluntary Inter-industry Commerce Solution Association (VICS).¹ These recommendations are best practices derived from the experience of hundreds of organizations in the area of logistics and supply chain management. Although these companies offer products varying in many aspects, they all have similar order fulfillment processes in place. For this process, an efficient collaboration with many trading partners is very important. Thus, companies prefer to use standards and suggestions, such as the VICS recommendations, for setting up their workflows instead of trying to innovate in executing these processes. Of course, not all companies have the same requirements on order fulfillments. For example, Zula Exquisite might only provide Full Truck-Load and Single Package Shipments and neglect Partial Truck-Loads. Contrary to Genko Oil, they therefore do not need to implement those parts of the Carrier Appointment subprocess dealing with Partial Truck-Loads. Still, there will be many commonalities with the order fulfillment process deployed at Genko Oil. Thus, instead of reimplementing this process from scratch, it is far more attractive for Zula Exquisite to amend the YAWL workflow model deployed at Genko Oil to their needs. Process configuration can prove beneficial when process adaptations are needed to suit specific requirements, for example, if a process model that depicts a certain business process in a general manner should be adapted to the requirements of an individual organization. It restricts the possible behaviorwith respect to a previously built process model in a controlled way before the process’ execution. The configuration of a process model therefore takes place in an adaptation phase between build time and runtime of a process model. Hence, at build time process, designers can integrate several variants of how a particular process can be executed into a single process model. Afterwards, the model user selects those parts relevant to the specific setting (e.g., an organization or project). All irrelevant model parts can then be automatically removed before the process is executed at runtime. This approach not only allows organizations like Zula Exquisite to adapt an existing model for the same process to individual needs, but it also enables organizations like VICS to provide templates for workflow models that are easily adaptable to user requirements while still conforming to their recommendations. These templates are called configurable reference process models. Furthermore, process configuration decisions can be mapped to domain related, natural language questions. In this way, users who are not very proficient in workflow modeling can adapt a process model through simply answering a questionnaire.