Abstract

Although coordination deficiencies in production planning and control (PPC) systems, which are a subset of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, still exist and even increase with progressing intra-organizational cooperation, workflow management systems (WfMS) could not yet be successfully established in PPC processes. This can be attributed to the complex structures of PPC tasks and the data they process, posing significant conceptual and technical problems to coupling ERP/PPC systems with other coordinating systems. Nevertheless, coordination mechanisms provided by workflow management technology and PPC functionality can complement each other. To that end, a workflow management system must fully “comprehend” the planning and control logic of industrial processes. This includes domain-specific knowledge on interdependencies of planning tasks, resources and capacity. On the other hand, PPC systems must cede some of their coordinating functions to the WfMS. Starting from a comparison of coordination in PPC systems and in WfMS, the paper suggests a model of integrated coordination of PPC processes by means of workflow management. The model is presented both on architectural and on detailed level, and is exemplarily applied to an order scheduling process.

Share

COinS