Business Process-aware ERP Development and Evolution

with the rapid development of the Internet and its wide application, the management of enterprises is gradually shifting from a closed environment to a dynamic and open one. So, how to improve the flexibility of ERP software under the Internet computing environment has become a key issue for ERP vendors and users. It is also the main focus of this paper. One process-aware ERP framework is proposed to support Internet-based ERP development and evolution in order to improve the flexibility of ERP software. In it, users, using visualized design tool, can reedit or change the existed business process model as required. And then the updated business process model and its changes can be automatically propagated to process engine. The latter can call the analyzer for changes to determine the complexity of these changes, which can be measured by the property of forward compatibility defined to evaluate the scale and status of the coming evolution. After that, activity instance scheduler together with change locators are called to cooperatively complete the process evolution by operating the caching sequence of activity and service instances. Comparison with current research work and our practice had shown that this framework runs well.