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Orchestrating supply chain interactions using emerging process description languages and business rules

Published: 25 March 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Business processes are significant assets to an organization; they are the fundamental ways in which it achieves its goals. To respond to changes in today's fast moving environment, companies need software that will enable them to restructure their processes to align with business objectives. Business Process Management (BPM) allows companies to manage process lifecycles. To sustain competitive advantage in today's fast moving economy, companies need corporate visibility. With a Business Process Management System (BPMS), key individuals will be able to see into the heart of their company's operations, tweaking processes when necessary. In the context of supply chains, companies can monitor their contributions to a more global process. A BPMS utilizes the technology infrastructures currently available to create and deploy processes throughout the enterprise and leverages data, process, and integration standards to ensure interoperability. Rules and rule engines are becoming increasingly important to BPMS software. The business rule approach decouples business logic encoded as business rules from the applications in an organization. A flexible rule-based system allows companies change rules quickly to keep in tune with changing business policies. XESS is an XML based Expert System Shell that creates and downloads rules to XESS Inference Engines deployed throughout a business scenario. It is a flexible, intelligent middleware built using open standards and Java technologies.

References

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Cited By

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  • (2011)Computer Support for Cooperative Sustainability CommunicationSustainability Communication10.1007/978-94-007-1697-1_15(171-185)Online publication date: 19-May-2011
  • (2007)A development of business rules with decision tables for business processesTENCON 2007 - 2007 IEEE Region 10 Conference10.1109/TENCON.2007.4428932(1-4)Online publication date: Oct-2007

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Paola Forcheri

A rule management technology called XESS, apt for inclusion in a business process management system as part of the business logic and process execution layer, is introduced in this paper. Via XESS, the authors provide an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based technology able to decouple business rules (business logic) from the application. The system includes three components: a Java-based rule editor, to create and modify rules; a Web-based administration tool that manages agents and user access privileges; and an agent component, centered on a business rule engine, that includes the rule inferencing code. XESS is presently a prototype. The illustration of the system is preceded in the paper by a reasonably in-depth discussion of business process management, and by an analysis of the rule-based approach. The paper is quite technical in nature, and could be of interest to information technology (IT) developers and managers involved in choices and plans for improving business process management. The work is quite well presented, and the needs of the overall application are explained quite clearly. The benefits and limitations of the proposal are pointed out, and the paper is well written and organized. However, there is no mention of a preliminary experiment based on the proposal. Notwithstanding this fact, this work constitutes an interesting example of the use of open standards and Java technology in the management of business processes. Online Computing Reviews Service

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICEC '04: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Electronic commerce
March 2004
684 pages
ISBN:1581139306
DOI:10.1145/1052220
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 25 March 2004

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Author Tags

  1. business process management
  2. process description languages
  3. rule markup language
  4. rule-based systems
  5. web services
  6. workflow

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Cited By

View all
  • (2011)Computer Support for Cooperative Sustainability CommunicationSustainability Communication10.1007/978-94-007-1697-1_15(171-185)Online publication date: 19-May-2011
  • (2007)A development of business rules with decision tables for business processesTENCON 2007 - 2007 IEEE Region 10 Conference10.1109/TENCON.2007.4428932(1-4)Online publication date: Oct-2007

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