Long Running Transactions Within Enterprise Resource Planning Systems

Recently, one of the major problems in various countries is the management of complicated organisations to cope with the increasingly competitive marketplace. This problem can be solved using Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems which can offer an integrated view of the whole business process within an organisation in real-time. However, those systems have complicated workflow, are costly to be analysed to manage the whole business process in those systems. Thus, Long Running Transaction (LRTs) models have been proposed as optimal solutions, which can be used to simplify the analysis of ERP systems workflow to manage the whole organiational process and ensure that completed transactions in a business process are not processed in any other process. Practically, LRTs models have various problems, such as the rollback and check-pointing activities. This led to the use of Communication Closed Layers (CCLs) for decomposing processes into layers to be analysed easily using sequential programs. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to develop an advanced approach to implement and analyse the workflow of an organisation in order to deal with failures in Long Running Transaction (LRTs) within Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems using Communication Closed Layers (CCLs). Furthermore, it aims to examine the possible enhancements for the available methodology for ERP systems based on studying the LRT suitability and applicability to model the ERP workflows and offer simple and elegant constructs for implementing those complex and expensive ERP workflow systems. The implemented model in this thesis offers a solution for two main challenges; incompatibilities that result from the application of transitional transaction processing concepts to the ERP context and the complexity of ERP workflow. The first challenge is addressed based on offering new semantics to allow modelling of concepts, such as rollbacks and check-points through various constraints, while the second is addressed through the use of the Communication Closed Layer (CCL) approach. The implemented computational reconfigurable model of an ERP workflow system in this work is able to simulate real ERP workflow systems and allows obtaining more understanding of the use of ERP system in enterprise environments. Moreover, a case study is introduced to evaluate the application of the implemented model using three scenarios. The conducted evaluation stage explores the effectiveness of executable ERP computational models and offers a simple methodology that can be used to build those systems using novel approaches. Based on comparing the current model with two previous models, it can be concluded that the new model outperforms previous models based on benefiting from their features and solving their limitations which make them inappropriate to be used in the context of ERP workflow models.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

PhD

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

De Montfort University

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Bajahzar, Abdullah

• Long
• Running
• Transactions
• Enterprise
• Resource
• planning
• communication
• Layers

Licence

• https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/bitstreams/b8f17554-c4ba-41a6-a1c1-b7342b85a123/download