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[F]
Prepare
Shipment
[H]
Regular
Dispatch
(5a)
Agreement
(1) Order
(3) Quote
[B]
Check
Inventory
[C]
Replenish
(8)
Delivery
Note
XOR
[A]
Confirm
Order
[E]
Send
Acceptance
(6) AuthOf
Invoice
[D]
Credit
Check
[G]
Billing +
Invoicing
[J]
Priority
Dispatch
(4)
CreditNote
(5b) Job
Description
(2) Offer
(7) Invoice
Fig. 1. Generic order process and associated document types
Delayed Documents : A company potentially decides to delay the Agreement
(5a) message until the P repareShipment (F) activity signals the completion
of the production and packaging sub process. Such a company might depend
on just-in-time delivery of subcontracted parts and thus cannot guarantee
order completion any earlier.
Premature Documents : For premium customers, shipping becomes indepen-
dent of billing thus the DeliveryNote message (8) potentially occurs before
Invoice (7).
Shifted Documents : To guarantee that the Invoice (7) always exactly reflects
the packaged goods, the ERP system no longer issues the Authenticationof
Invoice message (6). Instead the P repareShipment (F) step triggers this
message.
2 Related Work
In the last decades considerable research effort was spent on systems for sup-
porting flexible processes. In dynamic environments where business requirements
continuously change, processes need to be able to adapt to fluctuating con-
straints. Processes cannot remain rigidly structured but need to support ad-hoc
human control and evolve along alternative execution paths. Depending on the
supported level of flexibility, we can distinguish between roughly three types of
processes (including some example works):
Ad-hoc processes provide no constraints on the order of process activities and
provide the user complete freedom of choice [9,6,20,3].
Semi-structured processes (or case-based processes [17]) contain some struc-
ture and capture best practices (e.g., from previous process instances) but
are still too complex to be fully specified for automatic execution [18,2,15,19].
Well-structured processes are rigidly configured and determine for each con-
dition the exact flow of control, data, and the involved resources and actors.
User involvement is limited to human tasks (if at all) while process manage-
ment and execution control is fully automated [16,1,14].
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