Engineering cooperations for vehicle development have proven to be successful not just to extend capacities but to profit from each other's specific know-how. Workflow management bears the potential to reduce cooperation barriers and costs. Within a cooperation project between DaimlerChrysler AG and EDAG, application scenarios have been defined to identify goals and benefits, to analyse important requirements, and to develop an IT solution concept, together with the University of Stuttgart.

Manufacturer and supplier both would profit from 1.) manageable automation of cross-organizational workflows, 2.) transparency of their partner's processes, 3.) flexibility of specifying own workflows autonomously, and 4.) integration of heterogeneous workflow management systems. For research, this field of application is challenging because existing approaches so far do not seem to be sufficient.

We describe a relevant scenario from an engineering cooperation project in detail. The resulting requirements do not only occur across companies, but in general even inside a single company. An appropriate solution should be able to deal with multiple interactions and some more complex dependencies between different workflows. It should be possible to make relevant data visible but keep irrelevant information private, and to support a late evolution of partner's workflows.

To address those requirements appropriately, our approach minimizes the specification agreed between the partners, therefore allowing to specify the associated partner's workflows in a decentralized, delayed manner. External workflow schemata can be used to give partners a view on each other's workflow. We use a peer-to-peer architecture in which complex dependencies between workflows are mapped onto simpler messages.