Workflow management based on process model repositories

Workflow management is an area of increasing interest. Nonetheless there are only a few workflow systems which are actually used for supporting business processes in an industrial context. Most of these systems only deal with processes which create and manipulate unstructured pieces of information, like documents and images. Our workflow management approach, called the FUNSOFT net approach, additionally supports the management of structured pieces of information, called objects. In doing so, we use a repository which is used to store information about process models and about individual processes. This repository is particularly useful for processes dealing with highly structured information, such as software processes. We describe the experience in using such a repository. We point out which of these experiences may be useful for developers of other workflow management systems as well.