Assessing Workflow Ability of ERP and WfM Systems for Implementing Business Processes

2. Theoretical Background And Related Work

Workflow Management System is a technology mainly focused on the automation of business processes. It is widely adopted for supporting production activities of people in enterprises (Hollingsworth, 1995; Fischer, 2002). By contrast, ERP systems mainly address the need of having an integrated database that serves different functional modules supporting specific tasks of the enterprises. In the literature, there are several definitions of ERP systems (Sarmand, Marinos, & Rashid, 2004; Hossain, Patrick, & Rashid, 2002; Davenport, 1998).

ERP systems overcome the data separation of multiple functional applications by allowing individual modules to share the same data. Moreover, most of them contain functionality for modeling, deploying and managing workflows. The ERP “embedded” Workflow System is a module which is a part of the core ERP architecture.