Business Processs Modelling Notation (BPMN)

Recently in class we talked briefly about Swim Lane Diagrams used to model Business Processes. I found that there is standardized notation developed to use within Swim Lane Diagrams and generally Business Processes - BPMN. The reason why this standard was developed is to provide businesses with the capability of understanding their internal procedures in a graphical notation and will give them the ability to communicate these procedures in a standard manner. What is more, the graphical notation could facilitate the understanding of the performance collaborations and business transactions between the organizations. This will ensure that businesses will understand themselves and participants in their business and will enable organizations to adjust to new internal and business to business circumstances quickly.

To get an idea about the standard BPMN look through following components of BPMN

• Core elements
• Activities
• Events
• Gateways
• Connections
• Artifacts
• Swimlanes

Keeping these components in mind, here are some examples of BPMN usage:

• Process with normal flow
• Discussion cycle
• E-mail voting
• Collecting votes
  

Since BPMN is perceived as a standard there are many implementations related to this notation, they could be found in many software modelling tools like Altova or specially dedicated Business Process Modelling tools.

In relation to my previous post discussing Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), I recommend to look at following PDF which I found to see how BPMN to BPEL mapping is realized. Moreover, there is a great article about Business Process Modelling , technologies used according to BPM and trends in those technologies, it is quite long so it is better to look at it directly rather than summarize it here and make spaghetti :)