With increasing global exposure, today's enterprises must react quickly to changes, rapidly develop new services and products, and at the same time improve productivity and quality and reduce cost. Business process re-engineering and workflow automation to coordinate activities throughout the enterprise are recognized as important emerging technologies to support these requirements. Rosy estimates of a multi-billion dollar marketplace for workflow software has resulted in significant commercial activities in the area, with nearly hundred products now claiming to support workflow automation. While many help to automate document- and image-driven office applications, therefore helping to improve the productivity of small groups, most current products fail to support:• mission critical and enterprise-wide applications with requirements such as failure handling and recovery, and• interoperability with existing heterogeneous information systems.In this tutorial, we will discuss requirements for applications involving workflow automation, present an overview of the current state-of-the-art in products, and present some of the research efforts that are attempting to respond to unmet challenges.