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.
Business Process Modeling / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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BPMN Diagrams – Make It Right With Intermediate Compensation Events
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 Process Modeling / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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BPMN Diagrams – Stop The Presses! With Intermediate Cancel Events
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 Process Modeling / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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BPMN Diagrams – Play Catch With Intermediate Errors
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.
Business Process Modeling / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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BPMN Diagrams – Never Too Late For An Intermediate Timer Event
Business process modeling in the real world requires us to represent how processes deal with exceptions, delays and deadlines. Intermediate timer events can be used to model deadlines and the business processes for handling them. See an example of how to model a business process where two deadlines expire and the business responds.
Business Process Modeling / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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BPMN Diagrams – Wait For An Intermediate Timer Event
Business process modeling requires us to model behaviors of people and organizations. Those behaviors often involve waiting. Prescribed delays, or waiting for a specific time or date is what we can represent with an intermediate timer event in the sequence flow of a BPMN diagram. This article shows an example of how to model this delay in a business process.
Business Process Modeling / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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BPMN Diagrams – Boundary Intermediate Message Events
Intermediate message events can be placed on an activity boundary in BPMN. This use represents a form of exception handling for a task or sub-process, in response to an incoming message. This is a very different behavior than the ones we previously described, which show how to use intermediate message events in the course of the normal sequence flow of a business process.
Administrivia / Business Process Modeling / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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Yesterday’s BPMN Post Was A Big Fat Lie
Yesterday’s post contained a pretty significant mistake (aka “Big Fat Lie”). I showed a diagram that was in violation of the BPMN specification for intermediate message events. The post has been corrected, showing both the “bad” instructions, and the associated corrections. The proper way to use intermediate message events within […]
Business Process Modeling / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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BPMN Diagrams – Flowing Intermediate Message Events
One of the 9 intermediate events in BPMN is the message intermediate event. There are two ways to use the message intermediate event, as an element in the sequence flow, or as an attachment to the boundary of an activity for exception processing. See how to use message intermediate events in a sequence flow. [Updated with correction of glaring error on Aug 22nd, 2006]