Workflow Application

A workflow application is where various applications, components, and people must be involved in the processing of data to complete an instance of a process. For example, consider a purchase order that moves through various departments for authorization and eventual purchase. The orders may be treated as messages, which are put into various queues for processing. It is critical that the state of the queues are captured.

A workflow process involves constant change and update. You can introduce new components into the operation without changing any code.
There are two ways of developing workflow applications. The first one is to design workflow models in a dedicated language and then to link the tasks in these models to worklist handlers (for human tasks) or software applications (for automated tasks).

Workflow languages usually come with an associated graphical notation, but some are textual or XML-based. Languages that can be used for workflow definition in this way include:
Dedicated workflow specification languages:
1. XPDL
2. YAWL
3. SCUFL
Executable process definition languages based on Web Services:
1. BPEL
2. BPML
3. WSFL
4. XLANG
5. Wf-XML
6. SWSL

Ref: wikipedia

Workflow Operation

A workflow is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, work of a simple or complex mechanism, work of a group of persons, work of an organization of staff, or machines. Workflow may be seen as any abstraction of real work, segregated in work share, work split or whatever types of ordering. For control purposes, workflow may be a view on real work under a chosen aspect, thus serving as a virtual representation of actual work. The flow being described often refers to a document that is being transferred from one step to another.

A workflow is a model to represent real work for further assessment, e.g., for describing a reliably repeatable sequence of operations. Another example of workflow operation is online business of roller shades, woven wood shades, blinds store; they also need to have proper workflow than and than they can do business online. More abstractly, a workflow is a pattern of activity enabled by a systematic organization of resources, defined roles and mass, energy and information flows, into a work process that can be documented and learned. Workflows are designed to achieve processing intents of some sort, such as physical transformation, service provision, or information processing.

Workflow concepts are closely related to other concepts used to describe organizational structure, such as silos, functions, teams, projects, policies and hierarchies. Workflows may be viewed as one primitive building block of organizations. The relationships among these concepts are described later in this entry.

The term workflow is used in computer programming to capture and develop human to machine interaction. Workflow software aims to provide end users with an easier way to orchestrate or describe complex processing of data in a visual form, much like flow charts but without the need to understand computers or programming.

Workflow Features

1. Modeling: Workflow problems can be modeled and analyzed using graph-based formalisms like Petri nets.
2. Measurement: Many of the concepts used to measure scheduling systems in operations research are useful for measuring general workflows. These include throughput, processing time, and other regular metrics.
3. Specialized connotations: The term workflow has specialized connotations in information technology, document management and imaging. Since 1993, one trade consortium specifically focused on workflow management and the interoperability of workflow management systems has been the Workflow Management Coalition.
4. Scientific workflows: Found wide acceptance in the fields of bioinformatics and cheminformatics in the early 2000s, where they successfully met the need for multiple interconnected tools, handling of multiple data formats and large data quantities. Also, the paradigm of scientific workflows was close to the well-established tradition of Perl scripting in life-science research organizations, so this adoption represented a natural step forward towards a more structured infrastructure setup.
5. Human-machine interaction: Several conceptualizations of mixed-initiative workflows have been studied, particularly in the military, where automated agents play roles just as humans do. For innovative, adaptive, collaborative human work the techniques of human interaction management are required.

Workflow Improvement Theories

A workflow is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, work of a simple or complex mechanism, work of a group of persons, work of an organization of staff, or machines. Workflow may be seen as any abstraction of real work, segregated in work share, work split or whatever types of ordering. For control purposes, workflow may be a view on real work under a chosen aspect, thus serving as a virtual representation of actual work. The flow being described often refers to a document that is being transferred from one step to another. A blinds company with roller shades and woven wood shades product require giving steps by steps instruction document to the end user.

The key driver to gain benefit from the understanding of the workflow process in a business context is that the throughput of the work stream path is modeled in such a way as to evaluate the efficiency of the flow route through internal silos with a view to increasing discrete control of uniquely identified business attributes and rules and reducing potential low efficiency drivers. Evaluation of resources, both physical and human is essential to evaluate hand-off points and potential to create smoother transitions between tasks. Several workflow improvement theories have been proposed and implemented in the modern workplace. These include:
1. Six Sigma
2. Total Quality Management
3. Business process reengineering
4. Lean systems

As a way of bridging the gap between the two, significant effort is being put into defining workflow patterns that can be used to compare and contrast different workflow engines across both of these domains. For example, motels-hotels have different workflow than term life insurance Company. Workflow improvement helps in generating more profits for any business.

Workflow Features and Phenomenology

1. Modeling: Workflow problems can be modeled and analyzed using graph-based formalisms like Petri nets.
2. Measurement: Many of the concepts used to measure scheduling systems in operations research are useful for measuring general workflows. These include throughput, processing time, and other regular metrics.
3. Specialized connotations: The term workflow has specialized connotations in information technology, document management and imaging. Since 1993, one trade consortium specifically focused on workflow management and the interoperability of workflow management systems has been the Workflow Management Coalition.
4. Scientific workflows: Found wide acceptance in the fields of bioinformatics and cheminformatics in the early 2000s, where they successfully met the need for multiple interconnected tools, handling of multiple data formats and large data quantities. Also, the paradigm of scientific workflows was close to the well-established tradition of Perl scripting in life-science research organizations, so this adoption represented a natural step forward towards a more structured infrastructure setup.
5. Human-machine interaction: Several conceptualizations of mixed-initiative workflows have been studied, particularly in the military, where automated agents play roles just as humans do. For innovative, adaptive, collaborative human work the techniques of human interaction management are required.

Workflow Components

A workflow can usually be described using formal or informal flow diagramming techniques, showing directed flows between processing steps. While talking with owner of Roller shade blinds and woven wood shades blinds company, he says Single processing steps or components of a workflow can basically be defined by three parameters:
1. Input description: the information, material and energy required to complete the step
2. Transformation rules, algorithms, which may be carried out by associated human roles or machines, or a combination
3. Output description: the information, material and energy produced by the step and provided as input to downstream steps.

Components can only be plugged together if the output of one previous (set of) component(s) is equal to the mandatory input requirements of the following component. Thus, the essential description of a component actually comprises only in- and output that are described fully in terms of data types and their meaning (semantics). The algorithms' or rules' description need only be included when there are several alternative ways to transform one type of input into one type of output – possibly with different accuracy, speed, etc.

When the components are non-local services that are invoked remotely via a computer network, such as Web services, additional descriptors (such as QoS and availability) also must be considered.