Automating workflow planning is one of the most crucial digital transformation activities. Planning cross-organisational workflows requires knowledge from multiple domains. In addition, it requires an overview of how these workflows interact with each other. Existing computer-assisted tools usually lack domain-specific knowledge and flexible support for cross-organisational processes, and very often do not take the actual experience of the workflow participants into account to detect potential bottlenecks in the workflows. Therefore, workflow planning is still largely a manual process relying on human experts, e.g., in hospitals and large enterprises.
The ultimate goal of the project, CROFLOW, is to devise a new methodology to automate cross-organisational workflow planning and revisioning, which will eventually contribute to a successful digitalisation in both public and private sectors in the future. To achieve this goal, CROFLOW aims at developing an innovative model-driven methodology to capture and analyse the interactions between workflows, and to extract workflow participant experience. The accompanying analyses and tool support will contribute to automated planning for cross-organisational processes.
CROFLOW will collaborate with Uppsala University (Sweden) and University of Lübeck (Germany) to bring together theoretical and experimental methods to tackle the identified research challenges. The final outcomes of the project will be evaluated through a case study taken from the healthcare domain (provided by the Department of Pathology, Haukeland University Hospital), where almost all processes are cross-functional or cross-organisational.
The project’s approach represents a potential breakthrough of the existing techniques for cross-organisational processes. The success of CROFLOW will result in substantial positive impacts on planning practice.