A Workflow-Driven Web Inventory Management System for Reprocessing Businesses

This paper describes the design and implementation of a workflow-driven web application to manage the inventory and business operations for the recycling and reprocessing businesses. On the backend, the relational database is built with flexibilities and extensibilities for future organization expansion. The user management is customized to the company needs with tiered role-based data access control. For the front end, the graphical user-friendly interface is tailored for non-IT users to efficiently update and search inventory items, track incoming and outgoing orders, and manage their business workflow. For the middleware, the business logics, operational workflow managements, the data processing, the system optimizations, and web-page connections are integrated into the design and development for the various business operations. The system has been implemented using MySQL and PHP with the XAMPP the web service package. Additional dashboards, graphic user interfaces, and data analytical functions have also been implemented. This system can be easily transformed to other database management systems and other middleware tools. The overall database design can be conveniently adopted by other businesses where inventory management is a challenge.