Essential Process Modeling

Business process models are important at various stages of the BPM lifecycle. Before starting to model a process, it is crucial to understand why we are modeling it. The models we produce will look quite differently depending on the reason for modeling them in the first place. There are many reasons for modeling a process. The first one is simply to understand the process and to share our understanding of the process with the people who are involved with the process on a daily basis. Indeed, process participants typically perform quite specialized activities in a process such that they are hardly confronted with the complexity of the whole process. Therefore, process modeling helps to better understand the process and to identify and prevent issues. This step towards a thorough understanding is the prerequisite to conduct process analysis, redesign or automation.

In this chapter we will become familiar with the basic ingredients of process modeling using the BPMN language. With these concepts, we will be able to produce business process models that capture simple temporal and logical relations between activities, data objects and resources. First, we will describe some essential concepts of process models, namely how process models relate to process instances. Then, we will explain the four main structural blocks of branching and merging in process models. These define exclusive decisions, parallel execution, inclusive decisions and repetition. Finally, we will cover information artifacts and resources involved in a process.