WfMC

The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) is an international industry association formed in 1993 to develop and promote open standards for workflow management and interoperability among workflow systems. It brings together software vendors, end users, and research organizations to coordinate standardization efforts and share best practices.

The WfMC's most enduring contributions are a set of standards and reference materials. The Workflow Reference Model (WRM), published in the mid-1990s, provides a layered architecture and functional definitions intended to describe the capabilities of a workflow management system and its interfaces. The Coalition also produced interoperability specifications that define how independent workflow engines and applications can exchange process definitions and execution data. In addition, the XML Process Definition Language (XPDL) was introduced as a machine-readable XML format for encoding workflow process definitions to enable exchange between tools and runtimes.

WfMC standards were widely discussed and adopted in early workflow projects and toolchains, and XPDL in particular remains in use in some tool ecosystems for legacy or vendor-specific reasons. Over time, the rise of other standards and approaches—most notably BPMN from the OMG family and BPEL—led to a decline in WfMC’s activity as a standards body. The coalition's influence is regarded as foundational in the history of workflow standards, contributing early consensus on interoperability and process definition exchange.