Workflow management systems (WFMS) are a cornerstone of mission-criticial, possibly cross-organizational business processes. For largescale applications both their performance and availability are crucial factors, and the system needs to be properly configured to meet the application demands. Despite ample work on scalable system architectures for workflow management, the literature has neglected the important issues of how to systematically measure the performance of a given system configuration and how to determine viable configurations without resorting to expensive trial-anderror or guesswork. This paper proposes a synthetic benchmark for workflow management systems; based on the TPC-C order-entry benchmark, a complete e-commerce workflow is specified in a system-independent form. This workflow benchmark, which stresses all major components of a workflow system and is parameterized in a flexible manner, has been applied to two operational systems, the commercial system Staffware97 ...