YAWL4Film

Abstract

In recent years, business process management (BPM) and workflow technology has reached a certain level of maturity, with a great potential to deliver benefits in a wide range of application areas. Nevertheless, it is typically applied by companies with a high adoption level of information technology. As part of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, the BPM Group at Queensland University of Technology decided to explore the potential of applying BPM and workflow technology to the field of screen business. The field of screen business is characterized by business processes with high demands for creativity and flexibility. These processes span a value chain consisting of four major phases: development, preproduction, production, and postproduction. Out of these four phases, production is the most expensive phase in screen business as it is when the movie is actually created and shot. Also, it is during production that the majority of cast and crew are contracted and the majority of equipment and resources utilized. At present, a film production is a highly manual process that requires handling large amounts of heterogeneous data on a daily basis and coordinating many geographically distributed stakeholders. Not surprisingly, such a process is time-consuming and error-prone, and can easily increase the risk of delays in the schedule. Applying a workflow system can provide benefits to the film production process by automating, streamlining, and optimizing the process. YAWL offers such capabilities and moreover its service-oriented architecture facilitates the development of sophisticated extensions to tailor workflow systems to the needs of screen business.