BPMN Tutorial

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Why should I care about BPMN?

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Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is the global standard for process modeling and one of the most important components of successful Business-IT-Alignment.

More and more organizations are using BPMN and in more and more universities BPMN is taught as a subject. These are the reasons:

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A simple flow in BPMN

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Let’s begin our BPMN tutorial with a rather simple process diagram:

This diagram shows a simple process triggered by someone being hungry. The result is that someone must shop for groceries and prepare a meal. After that, someone will eat the meal and have his or her hunger satisfied.

Best Practice: Naming Conventions

When naming tasks, we try to adhere to the object-oriented design principle of using the [verb] + [object] pattern. We would say “acquire groceries,” for example, not “first take care of shopping for groceries.” Events refer to something that has already happened regardless of the process (if they are catching events) or as a result of the process (if they are throwing events). For this reason, we use the [object] and make the [verb] passive in voice, so we write “hunger noticed.” BPMN does not require you to model start and end events for a process – you can leave them out – but if you model a start event, you must model an end event for each path. The same is true for end events, which require start events. We always create our models with start and end events for two reasons: first, that way it’s possible to determine the process trigger, and second, you can describe the final status of each path end. We only sometimes abandon this practice with sub-processes. More on this later.

FAQ: Is it obligatory to draw BPMN diagrams horizontally? What if I prefer to draw them vertically?

You could always draw your diagrams from top to bottom instead from left to right – the BPMN 2.0 standard does not forbid it. However, we do not recommend it: It is very uncommon, and experience has proven that people tend to understand the process flow better if it is described in the same way as written text (from left to right, at least in the western world).

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Examples

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Shipment Process

The examples of this BPMN tutorial are based on the contributions we made to the document “BPMN 2.0 by example”, the BPMN tutorial provided by OMG (Download as PDF).

In this diagram you can find the preparing steps a hardware retailer has to fulfill before the ordered goods can actually be shipped to the customer:

In this example, we only used one pool and different lanes for the people involved in this process, which automatically means that we blank out the communication between those people: We just assume that they are somehow communicating with each other. If we had a process engine driving this process, that engine would assign user tasks and therefore be responsible for the communication between those people. If we do not have such a process engine, but want to model the communication between the people involved explicitly, we would have to use a collaboration diagram as described in the next chapter.

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Pizza Collaboration

This example is about Business-To-Business-Collaboration. Because we want to explicitly model the interaction between a pizza customer and the vendor, we have classified them as “participants”, therefore providing them with dedicated pools: