At eworks, we are like to adopt paradigms that do go beyond the classic straight forward hard coding for things, that would need to be altered in foreseeable time. One of these paradigms is widely used in artificial intelligence, computer games (SIC) and it is very usefull for business applications too: Finite State Machines. NIST is using it, Apollo missions used it to fly to the moon. And: Every elevator is using it, avoiding MS blue screens and a fall down from the 36st floor...

Joern of eworks discovered computers in the early 80s of the last century, worked on PDP”s and DEC Vaxes and still does carry this knowledge eventually invented during WW2. People like Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky and others (please do visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine for a full erata) used it, wrote on it. Alan Turings infinite band was the the basic theory that made the Nazi German Enigma Code get weak.

What are finite state machine good for? They help to describe the states of a business process and the transitions necessary to reach from start to beginning. If you ever wanted to build integrations, workflows, mars-missions, these state machines would be the tool!

In 1997 Joern was able to work with IBM-think tank master Dipayan Gangopadhyay who later patented on "Modeling behaviors of objects associated with finite state machines and expressing a sequence without introducing an intermediate state with the arc language" 

At eworks we do have that available for the core processes within SAP!