BPMN stands for Business Process Modeling Notation and it is a workflow business process modeling language.
It is a easy to understand modeling language that is used to represent business processes in numerous organization.
It is used by business analyst to document business processes in a standardized way that would be easy for all the stakeholders to understand.
BPMN is an industry standard language that has notations which represent different actions, people and processes in a business process.
Some of the notations include the following:
- Task: A task is used to to represents a piece of work. An example of a piece of work is filling a leave request form.
2. Transaction: a transaction is a series of activities that are performed to achieve a purpose. An example of a transaction is processing a supplier’s invoice.
3. Call Activity: a call activity is a point in the process that has a reusable task. An example of a call activity is if a sales invoice is sent for approval because the customer has exceeded their credit limit.
This would trigger a call activity which is set up to check if the customer’s average monthly sales history is more than $100,000, if yes then their credit limit is increased, but if no then the transaction is rejected.
4. Event: An Event is when something happens such as a user’s action. There are different types of events such as start, intermediate and end event.
A start event is what triggers the process such as when a customer needs to make a purchase.
The intermediate event is what moves the process on to another task such as the customer pays for the purchase.
The end event is what completes the process such as when the goods are delivered to the customer.
5. Gateway: A gateway is used to represent a divergence of the process into 2 or more branches.
There are different types of gateways and they include the following:
Exclusive Gateway: this is when the the path is split and it branches out into one of the output branches.
Inclusive Gateway: this is when the the path is split based on a condition. The branches are merged back when the active branches conditions are fulfilled and completed.
Parallel Gateway : this is when the process splits and all the branches are working simultaneously. The branches are merged back into one when they have all been completed.