Building a production planning process with an approach based on CIMOSA and workflow management systems

Nowadays, one of the major challenges for enterprises is to stay competitive in today's changing market environment. This can be supported by business process models which on one hand are consistent and adequate (requirement #1), and on the other hand can be enacted and operated in an easy, fast, straightforward and integrated way (requirement #2). The CIMOSA architecture provides the basis for business process modelling to fulfil both of the above requirements. It supports the creation of consistent process models and allows to identify almost all the information required for the development of a workflow model. These models can be implemented using one of the commercial workflow management systems. In this paper we present the methodology based on the CIMOSA architecture that we have developed to build a workflow model in ©Lotus Notes for the forecasting and production planning processes in a tiles manufacturing enterprise. The CIMOSA approach has also been used to design the necessary software applications for processing the information of the resulting workflow system.