Business Process Modeling with BPMN

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standard for modeling business processes in a workflow. This article gives a quick overview of all the essential elements of BPMN and how it can be used to create standardized business process models. BPMN is used by humans (business analysts, developers) to design, visualize, and manage business processes.  BPMN activities are spearheaded by the Object Management Group. The primary objective of BPMN is to provide a common set of simple graphical elements that are easily understood by all stakeholders of a business process.

“A standard Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) will provide businesses with the capability of understanding their internal business procedures in a graphical notation and will give organizations the ability to communicate these procedures in a standard manner. Furthermore, the graphical notation will facilitate the understanding of the performance collaborations and business transactions between the organizations. This will ensure that businesses will understand themselves and participants in their business and will enable organizations to adjust to new internal and B2B business circumstances quickly.” BPMN Charter.

 

Activities

An activity is a unit of work performed within a business process. An activity can be classified as atomic (Task) or compound (Sub-Process).

 

Events

An event is some condition that occurs during the course of a business process. Events are further classified into Start Events, Intermediate Events, and End Events.

• Start Events indicate where a process will begin.
  

  Start Events

   

• Intermediate Events occur anytime during the execution of the process (i.e. after the start of the process and before the end of the process).
  

  Intermediate Events

   

• End Events symbolize the end of the process
  

  End Events

 

Gateways

Gateways are elements that control the flow of the business process. They are further classified as:

Data-based Exclusive Gateway: When splitting, it routes the incoming sequence flow to exactly one of the outgoing branches based on the condition evaluation. While merging, it waits for one incoming branch before triggering the outgoing flow.

Event-based Exclusive Gateway: It represents a branching point in the process where the outgoing alternatives are based on the events that occur at that point in the process (as opposed to the condition evaluation).

Inclusive Gateway: When splitting, one or more branches are activated based on branching condition. While merging it waits for all active incoming branches to complete.

Parallel Gateway: When splitting, all outgoing branches are activated simultaneously. While merging, it waits for all incoming branches before triggering the outgoing flow.

Complex Gateway: It triggers one or more branches based on some complex, descriptive, or subjective logic.  It is used in cases where the other gateways cannot satisfy the requirements.

 

 

 

Swimlanes

The concept of swimlanes is used to partition organizations and responsibilities. Swimlanes consists of Pools and Lanes. Pools represent a high level organization of process objects. For xample, depending the business process, a pool can represent a company, department, or a regional office. A lane represents sub-partitions for objects within the pool. For example, it a company is represented as a pool, various functions within a company can be represented as lanes.

 

Artifacts

Artifacts provide the capability to depict information that cannot be captured by the basic flow-chart structure of the process. There are three standard artifacts in BPMN.

Text Annotation: It denotes some descriptive documentation for the BPMN object. 

Data Object: It represents data flowing through the process. For example document, email, file, etc. 

Group: It represents a logical grouping of elements. 

 

 

Connectors

 There are three types of connectors that can be used in BPMN.

Sequence Flow: It defines the execution order of activities.

Message Flow: It symbolizes information flow across organizational boundaries.

Association: It indicates flow of data from one activity to another.

 

 

This article gives the most basic introduction to BPMN to get you started in the right direction. You can start modeling a majority of simple processes by using the material presented here. However, for complex processes you will need to make use of the more advanced concepts of BPM like Exceptional Handling, Transactions and Compensation, Looping, Ad Hoc Processes, Orchestration, and Process Choreography.  For further reading, some good introductory articles can be found on official BPMN website.