Workflow Management Coalition - Press Release - 9-Jul-96
Successful Demonstration of Workflow Interoperability a Major
Milestone
International Vendors Link Business Processes Over Heterogeneous
Networks Using Coalition Standard
BRUSSELS, Belgium (July 9, 1996) --
The Workflow Management Coalition
(WfMC), a non-profit international organization of workflow vendors,
customers and consultants, today announced that it gave the first
successful live demonstration of its Workflow Interoperability
(Interface 4) specification at the Workflow Canada Conference in
Toronto on June 11, 1996. An international audience of over 200
professionals witnessed the demonstration, which included seven WfMC
member companies. CSE Systems, DEC, IBM, Microsoft, Staffware, and
Wang, participated in a Supply Chain Management scenario using their
implementation of the Coalition's specification for interoperability
between workflow engines. Workflow Solutions Group, also a Coalition
member, coordinated the project and provided the demonstration's
network infrastructure.
Supply Chain Interoperability
The demonstration was divided into three scenarios based on a
supply chain model in which there exist a number of collaborating
organizations, each of which depends on its workflow system to
accomplish work. The scenarios were 1) Retailer Replenishment Direct
from the Distributor, 2) Retailer Replenishment via Third Party
Warehouse, and 3) Retailer and Distributor Stock Replenishment,
including the need for customs documentation from the trucking
company's Bonding Department. The six products involved were run in
three heterogeneous environments, incorporating servers and clients on
UNIX, Windows, Windows NT, and OS/2. Mail delivery was routed via a
Windows NT DNS Server, and the client stations were connected using
Ethernet 10BaseT. There are currently two bindings defined for the
Workflow Interoperability specification, both of which were
demonstrated. These are MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions),
and MAPI-WF (MAPI Workflow Framework).
Success in a Critical Area Prior to the actual demonstration, the
participating vendors had tested each stage of each scenario via
Internet e-mail interaction. The success of these tests confirmed the
WfMC's position that this level of integration, whereby the
capabilities of multiple workflow products can communicate and
cooperate in data exchange and process hand-offs, offers substantial
end-result benefits for organizations that are extending their
business processes to include suppliers, business partners, and
customers. The demonstration's objective of rapidly getting
manufactured goods from the production line into retail stores, and
providing early notice and coordination of business processes across a
number of cooperating organizations, becomes reality.
According to a survey conducted at Gartner Group's 1995
Integrated Document and Office Systems Conference, potential workflow
benefits such as these are generally accepted, but "the largest
percentage of respondents (23 percent) said immaturity of technology
and lack of standards are the greatest barriers to broader acceptance
of workflow." The survey went on to predict that the WfMC
Interoperability specification would help solve this problem by
allowing enterprises to "manage business processes that span
intraenterprise and interenterprise boundaries."
The unequivocal success of the Workflow Canada demonstration
shows the veracity of this prediction. The demonstration graphically
depicted the ease with which the specification overcomes the stumbling
blocks commonly associated with the extreme complexity of network
building across multiple heterogeneous platforms.
Major Milestone Achieved -- Real Viability of Workflow Solutions
Proven
Professor Marvin Manheim of the J.L. Kellogg School of Management at
Northwestern University, and co-founder and co-Chair of the Black
Forest Group, introduced the Interoperability demonstration by saying,
"This demonstration was a major milestone not only for workflow, but
more importantly, for users of information technology in general.
Increasingly, users are discovering that significant business
processes require interactions among multiple business entities.
Since organizations have workflow systems from multiple vendors, it is
essential to support the flow of these processes across the entire
enterprise. Workflow integration capabilities will enable new forms
of process integration beyond anything that businesses have yet
developed, and will significantly alter the nature of global business
competition. The Workflow Management Coalition's Supply Chain example
shows how significant this can be."
Rick Uy, a Coalition member and Senior Technology Systems
Analyst at the Royal Bank of Canada, summed up the significance of the
demonstration by commenting, "The Coalition's Workflow
Interoperability demonstration should give any organization
implementing or evaluating a workflow product a certain level of
confidence. Not only does it prove the viability of workflow
technology as a solution for integrating different systems and
applications, but it should also give customers a comfortable feeling
that even vendors with different products and platforms have the
potential to work together to achieve a goal. We look forward to
seeing workflow vendors take advantage of the Coalition's standards
and specifications."
About the Workflow Management Coalition
Founded in 1993, the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) is a
non-profit, international organization of workflow vendors, customers and
consultants. The Coalition's mission is to promote the use of workflow through
the establishment of standards for software terminology, interoperability and
connectivity between workflow products. Consisting of more than 175 members in
25 countries, the Coalition has quickly become established as the primary
standards body for this rapidly expanding software market. In November 1995,
the Coalition published its workflow application programming interface
(Interface 2) specification designed to give users increased flexibility in
implementing standards-based workflow systems.
For further information contact:
Contact: Attn. Beth Johnson, Phase Two Strategies (beth_johnson@p2pr.com or tel:
415/772-8419) or Emmy Botterman, WfMC (100113.1555@compuserve.com
or tel: +32 2 774-9633).
Workflow Management Coalition Office
Avenue Marcel Thiry 204, 1200 Brussels,Belgium;
Tel: +32 2 774 96 33. Fax: +32 2 774 96 90
E-Mail: 100113.1555@compuserve.com
Or contact one of the Country
Contacts
WfMC Home Page
Last updated: Tue Jul 9 12:29:57 1996
by Austin Tate, AIAI (A.Tate@ed.ac.uk)