In manufacturing the interaction between the design of a product and the process to manufacture this product is studied in detail. Consider for example Material Requirements Planning (MRP), which is mainly driven by the Bill-Of-Material (BOM). For information-intensive products such as insurance, loans, permits, and many other services, the relationship with the supporting workflow process is often neglected. Typically, the workflow processes are designed without careful consideration of structure and characteristics of the product. In this paper, we present a method for designing efficient and effective workflows based on the products generated by the process rather than subjective interpretations of managers, consultants, and IT experts.
Wil M. P. van der Aalst, Hajo A. Reijers, S. Limam