B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Business Process Management (BPM) 133
Base of Integration
Platform
Figure 5.7. — BPM, B2Bi and EAI enable collaborative commerce
Start L* Task A I
Task B w»& Decision^
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[ End J Figure 5.8. — An example of a workflow
and provide the workflow engine the capability to invoke, execute or
launch them.
BPM gets very complicated for B2B applications, as the business
processes not only span across multiple applications but also across
multiple companies. This distributed nature of processes requires stable
applications supporting them at each link.
5.2.6. Workflow
Workflow is defined as the process of automation of business process.
A workflow can be represented as an ordered flowchart that is composed
of one or many activities (that represent a logical unit of work) (see
Figure 5.8). It is a way for organizing, formatting and representing a