A service-oriented approach for flexible process support within enterprises: application on PLM systems

Manufacturing industries collaborating to develop new products need to implement an effective management of their design processes (DPs) and product information. Unfortunately, product lifecycle management (PLM) systems which are dedicated to support design activities are not efficient as it might be expected. Indeed, DPs are changing, emergent and non deterministic, due to the business environment under which they are carried out. PLM systems are currently based on workflow technology which does not support process agility. So, needs in terms of process support flexibility are necessary to facilitate the coupling with the environment reality. Furthermore, service-oriented approaches (SOA) enhances flexibility and adaptability of composed solutions. Systems based on SOA have the ability to inherently being evolvable. So, we can say that SOA can promote a support of flexible DPs. The aim of this work is to propose an alternative approach for flexible process support within PLM systems. The objective is to specify, design and implement business processes (BPs) in a very flexible way so that business changes can rapidly be considered in PLM solutions. Unlike existing approaches, the proposed one deal with a service-oriented perspectives rather than an activity-oriented one.