Process Automation as the Foundation for E-Business

E-business is becoming the trademark of the 2000s. Companies are using the Web to communicate with their partners, connect with their back-end systems, and perform e-commerce transactions. However, the transition from traditional business to e-business requires a fundamental re-implementation of their business operational systems. Many companies have focused their transitions on developing webbased interfaces to their legacy applications. However, the backend infrastructure is often inadequate to support the offering, not only for established corporations but also, surprisingly, for many newly formed dotcoms. On the other hand, successful e-business companies have identified workflow as the key technology for connecting front-end and backend applications, for integrating, automating, and monitoring business and e-commerce processes, and for providing on-line service delivery. In this paper we discuss the benefits of workflow automation and we show why workflow is a key technology for building the foundation for ebusiness. We will demonstrate these concepts by presenting an example of a very successful ebusiness startup that has placed HP Changengine at the core of its e-business platform. 1. Behind the Web Facade E-Business is transforming corporations, markets, and the global economy. The Web is affecting the business transactions are performed: It makes it easy to find products and services as well as providers and suppliers, compare prices and qualities, and trade, buy, and get products and services quickly delivered to us. Customers are getting used to nice and friendly user interfaces, targeted advertisement, up-to-date product catalogues, and personalized stores. However, the web facade hides huge inefficiencies, manual and error-prone operations, and slow, complex, inflexible, and unmanageable systems. Indeed, quite surprisingly, in many e-commerce applications the execution of business processes still involves a lot of human intervention in several aspects of business process execution such as (repeated) data entry, monitoring of process executions (that often requires tracking the process over several system in order to find out its current advancement state), exception handling, and even the scheduling of the different activities that are part of the process. Inefficiencies in e-commerce processes result in high operating costs that, combined with the low margins required in order to provide competitive offers, are strongly affecting the profits of the large majority of ebusinesses (see Fig. 1). To compete successfully, enterprises are demanding effective ways to implement ebusiness and deliver e-services over the Internet. Most e-business applications are characterized by a web front-end, typically powered by a personalization engine, an application server that supports dynamic generation of web content and links the front-end to business applications, and a set of back-end systems that manage inventory, procurement, billing, payment, Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or special permission from the Endowment. Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Very Large Databases, Cairo, Egypt, 2000