Seamless Integration of E-Commerce and Business Process Management

Abstract

— Business process management (BPM) includes the capability to discover, design, deploy, execute, interact with, operate, optimize, and analyze business processes. It is critical for businesses in the current intensive and competitive market. Traditional BPM has problems in interoperability, agility, and flexibility. This research investigates the role of Web services in process management. Web services are loosely coupled reusable software components that semantically encapsulate discrete functionality. They provide a distributed computing technology for publishing, discovering, and consuming business services on the Internet or intranet using standard XML protocols and formats. Web services provide a way to empower business users to specify complex business functionality in a clear, building-block fashion that can be quickly modified. The paper presents the importance and benefits of using Web services for process management in e-Business. It also provides insights into various technical issues through the introduction to a Web services-oriented architecture for process management, which is exemplified using a prototype e-Procurement system.