Archive of Business Process Modeling Articles

One danger of using a precise language like BPMN to describe business processes is that you can precisely get yourself into trouble. Deadlock (in BPMN) is a condition used to describe a process that can’t be completed. By designing (or describing) the wrong business process, you can create a process that never finishes.

Nils proposes his rule of three boxes as a consideration when developing software or software features to improve business processes. In short, make sure that you can actually execute the new process. It isn’t enough to create a good “replacement process” - you have to be able to transition to the new process and then back out of it. The new process is plugged into a business ecosystem, and it must coexist with the existing processes.

One of our readers (thank you!) pointed out that another blogger was critiqueing one of our earlier business process modeling notation (BPMN) diagrams. Turns out we made a couple mistakes. Here’s a more detailed look at the compensation end event.

BPMN Diagrams don’t use the term control flow to describe processes. They use the terms sequence flow and message flow. Within sequence flow, there are four classifications of flow.

We can simplify BPMN Diagrams with intermediate multiple events. These events are combinations of different intermediate events, much like complex gateways combine different gateways.

Drawing business process diagrams can be tricky. Just getting the layout on the page to look good can be tricky. Intermediate link events can be used to clean up diagrams. They can also be used to jump from a specified point in one process to a specific point in another process.

Business process modeling is rarely applied to simplistic processes. Real world business processes often embody complex decision making. Complex decisions imply choices of action. Rule intermediate events, in BPMN, are designed to express these hard ideas with easy to read diagrams.

Sometimes we can’t undo our actions. Water under the bridge. But we can make it right by doing something else to compensate. BPMN allows us to use intermediate events to compensate for mistakes in the past. A classic example is cancellation of a purchase. Our example is a little more fun.

Business processes often need to be cancelled. An error condition can cause a process to terminate, or an incoming message can cause a process to be terminated. Error conditions occur within transactional subprocesses and a cancel intermediate event is used to describe any special cancellation steps.

Business Processes might start out as easy-to-diagram simple processes. Over time, these processes get more complex, as they have to deal with real-world considerations and unanticipated situations. Things can go wrong. Classical flow diagramming gets complex when dealing with errors or exceptions in a process, while BPMN modeling keeps things simple.