BPMN 2.0 Fundamentals
BPMN 2.0 Fundamentals
BPMN 2.0 Fundamentals
What is BPMN?
Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a standard for business process modeling, and provides a graphical notation for specifying business processes based on a flowcharting technique.
BPMN can represent Business Models by 4 kinds of diagrams: o Process Diagrams Represents regular flow between tasks, events and decision points to complete a process in the company. o Collaboration Diagrams Represents message flows or communication routes between process or entities like customers or partners. o Conversation Diagrams Represent groups of messages called communications and its relation between process and participants. o Choreography Diagrams Represent participant interaction between task and users or resources and the messages result of this interaction. Note: PM BPMN Designer supports Process and Collaboration diagram modeling.
Process Diagram
Collaboration Diagram
Choreography Diagram
Conversation Diagram
Process # 2 Diagram # 1
Diagram # 2
Participants
Data Objects
Flow Objects
Event
Activity
Gateway
Association
Swimlanes
Pool
Group Lane
An Event is something that happens during the course of a Process or a Choreography. An Event affects the flow of the model and usually have a cause (Trigger) or an impact (Result).
Event graphical representation is a circle. Theres 3 types of events: Start Events, Intermediate Events and End Event. Intermediate Events can be used in regular process diagrams and can be used as Boundary Events attached to an activity. Start Events and Intermediate Events can be Interrupting and Non-interrupting.
Activity is a generic term for work that company performs in a Process. An Activity Can be atomic or non-atomic.
The type of activities that are part of the process are: Task and Sub-Process. A task can be differenced by markers that represent its type or associated resource. Sub-Process can be Collapsed or Expanded, and can be differenced by the kind of elements that join in: Sub-process, Transactions, Event Sub Process and Call Activities.
A Gateway is used to control the divergence and convergence of sequence flows in a Process or in a choreography.
Theres 6 types or connection objects. All of them are represented for a line. Sequence Flow can be Normal, Default and Conditional, and always have direction, source and target.
Normal
Default
Message Flows are a type of connection object that is used to represent collaboration between two process.
Data Association is a line between a Data Object and An element.
Conditional
Association
Data Association
Message
BPMN 2.0 can represent Data in two ways: Data Stores and Data Objects. A Data Store provides a mechanism for Activities to retrieve or update stored information that will persist beyond the scope of the Process. The same Data Store can be visualized, through a Data Store Reference, in one or more places in the Process. Data Objects provide information about what Activities require to be performed and/or what they produce, Data Objects can represent a singular object or a collection of objects. Data Objects can be separated in Data Input and Data Output only considering direction of the information.
BPMN 2.0 considers 2 types of artifacts: Groups and Text Annotations. A Group is a grouping of graphical elements that are within the same Category. This type of grouping does not affect the Sequence Flows within the Group. The Category name appears on the diagram as the group label. Categories can be used for documentation or analysis purposes. Groups are one way in which Categories of objects can be visually displayed on the diagram. Text Annotations are a mechanism for a modeler to provide additional text information for the reader of a BPMN Diagram.
Into collaboration diagrams theres a main concept to consider: A PARTICIPANT. BPMN considers a participant an entity or process involved into a collaborative relation .
Participants
Object Management Group/Business Process Management Initiative www.bpmn.org Documents Associated with Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) Version 2.0 http://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0/
Enrique Ponce de Leon (qennix) Development Team Leader Colosa Inc. enrique@colosa.com iam@qennix.com August, 2011