Business Process Modeller Lite - Help
What is BPMN?
The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) has developed a standard Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). The BPMN 1.0 specification was released to the public in May, 2004. This specification represents more than two years of effort by the BPMI Notation Working Group. The primary goal of the BPMN effort was to provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users, from the business analysts that create the initial drafts of the processes, to the technical developers responsible for implementing the technology that will perform those processes, and finally, to the business people who will manage and monitor those processes. BPMN will also be supported with an internal model that will enable the generation of executable BPEL4WS. Thus, BPMN creates a standardized bridge for the gap between the business process design and process implementation.
BPMN defines a Business Process Diagram (BPD), which is based on a flowcharting technique tailored for creating graphical models of business process operations. A Business Process Model, then, is a network of graphical objects, which are activities (i.e., work) and the flow controls that define their order of performance.
BPMN Basics
A BPD is made up of a set of graphical elements. These elements enable the easy development of simple diagrams that will look familiar to most business analysts (e.g., a flowchart diagram). The elements were chosen to be distinguishable from each other and to utilize shapes that are familiar to most modelers. For example, activities are rectangles and decisions are diamonds. It should be emphasized that one of the drivers for the development of BPMN is to create a simple mechanism for creating business process models, while at the same time being able to handle the complexity inherent to business processes. The approach taken to handle these two conflicting requirements was to organize the graphical aspects of the notation into specific categories. This provides a small set of notation categories so that the reader of a BPD can easily recognize the basic types of elements and understand the diagram. Within the basic categories of elements, additional variation and information can be added to support the requirements for complexity without dramatically changing the basic look-and-feel of the diagram. The four basic categories of elements are:
- Flow Objects
- Connecting Objects
- Swimlanes
- Artifacts
What is the business context?
The business context is used to define the overall quality requirements for your current BPMN diagram business process. The information you enter in this form (pictured below) will be used to benchmark the results from your overall diagram results which will indicate how successful your process is in meeting the quality demands of your business context.
The title is the title of your current process
Time is the maximum total time you wish your current process to last.
Cost is the maximum you are willing to pay for your process to complete.
Reliability is the measure of how reliable your need your process to be.
How to create a diagram
Start by dragging a start event onto the 'blank slate'. The workspace will highlight green to indicate you can drop a BPMN element on this area.
Once a start event is in place you can begin dragging activities to begin building up the steps in your process.
You can edit the text of each activity by clicking on the text making an editable area appear. You can also on the image below the red end event. A BPMN diagam must always end with an end event.
Defining quality
The quality attributes of an activity, namely time (T), cost (C) and reliability (R) can be set by first clicking on an activity, then select the Q icon.
Running a diagram
Section describing the theory of execution
Reduction rules is the common technique of the analytical models. There are six distinct reduction rules which are sequence, parallel, conditional, fault tolerant, loop and network. The reduction rules are repeatedly applied to a business process until only one atomic task remains. The structure of business process changes each time a reduction rule applied. After a number of iterations only one task remains. This task contains the quality requirement metrics correspond to the overall business process.
Interpreting the results
Explanation of results to come here.
