Business process models and its support in Visual Paradigm

Zuzana Brťková

What is business process?

A business process is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product. This process can be broken down into a sequence of smaller and usually simpler processes or activities performed by a person or system

Purpose of modeling processes

• Control of current processes • Improving current processes• Designing new processes (reflecting business

requirements and inovating)• Handling interactions between processes• Automatizing processes

Business process model and notation

• BPMN is a graphical representation and standartized notation for specifying and modeling business processes

• Its idea and notation is similar to UML, but it's not a part of UML

• BPMN is developed by Business Process Management Initiative, which is now part of Object Management Group (author of UML)

Elements of BPMN

• Flow Objects: events, activities, gateways• Connecting Objects: sequence and message flow,

association• Swim Lanes: pool, lane• Artifacts: data object, group, annotation

Basic BPMN involves four element categories, divided into sub-categories:

Flow objects

Flow objects are main describing elements in BPMN. They are related to information flow in modeled process.Three basic types:• Events• Activities• Gateways

Types of flow objects

1) Events: denotes “something that happens to the business“, represented by a circle with an icon within, which denotes the type of an event

• Start event: acts as a process trigger, can only be of catch type

• Intermediate event: represents something that happensbetween the start and end events, can be throw or catch• End event: result of a process, only throw

Types of flow objects

2) Activities: Denotes “something that must be done“, a piece of work performed in business process. It´s represented with a rounded-corner rectangle

3) Gateways: Determines forking or merging paths (flow) through a business process. A gateway is represented with a diamond shape.

Connecting objects

Serve to connect flow objects together or with artifacts.Three basic types:• Sequence flows: determine the sequence of activities• Message flows: messages between process participants• Associations: associates text or data with other elements

Swim lanes

A visual mechanism that organizes and categorizes activities• Usually express roles of participants in a flowchart• Two types: pools and lanes• Pool can include multiple lanes – lane is a subset of its pool

Types of swim lanes

• Pools: represents major participants in a process (usually different organizations). Pools can be open, showing its internal details, or collapsed, hiding internal details (blackbox)• Lanes: organizes and categorizes activities within a pool according to their functions and roles.

Artifacts

• Data objects: show the reader which data is required or produced in an activity.

• Group: is represented with a rounded-corner rectangle and dashed lines. The group is used to group different activities but does not affect the flow in the diagram.

• Annotation: is used to give the reader of the model/diagram an understandable impression.

Allow developers to bring some more information into the model/diagram. There are three pre-defined artifacts and they are:

Example: Process of ordering

Support in VP

• As BPMN isn't a part of UML, it doesn't make a standard part of Visual Paradigm modeling abilities

• But exist a tool: Business Process Visual ARCHITECT which fully supports BPMN

Thank you for your attention