Professional Documents
Culture Documents
April, 2005
Table of Contents
1 2 3 4 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 3 Purpose...................................................................................................................... 3 What a Business Process is?................................................................................ 3 Business Process Modeling..................................................................................... 3 4.1 Process Design (as is)....................................................................................... 3 4.2 Process Model (proposed) .............................................................................. 4 5 Business Process Modeling Notation.................................................................... 4 6 Standard Template for the Business Process ....................................................... 9 7 Standard Template for the Step ........................................................................... 10
Introduction
An operation is composed of processes designed to add value by transforming inputs into useful outputs. Inputs may be materials, labor, energy, and capital equipment. Outputs may be a physical product (possibly used as an input to another process) or a service. Processes can have a significant impact on the performance of a business, and process improvement can improve organizations competitiveness.
Purpose
This document presents standard guidelines for documenting (as is) business processes. A standard template has also been devised that is based on BPMN 1.0 (developed by BPMI).
Graphically create a process map, or an electronic sketch of a process that specifies the tasks that must be performed and the sequence of the tasks in series or in parallel. Specify business rules and special conditions that dictate the flow of the process. Also mark out the exceptions that are inherent in each process. Determine the capacity of each step in the process and identify the bottlenecks (i.e. steps with lowest capacity) Evaluate further limitations in order to quantify the impact of the bottleneck. Identify the resources available to perform various tasks. Outline performance expectations for the time and cost of completing each step and the overall process.
BPMN defines a Business Process Diagram (BPD), which is based on a flowcharting technique tailored for creating graphical models of business operations. A Business Process Model is, therefore, a network of graphical objects, which are activities (i.e. work) and the flow controls that define their order of performance. A BPD consists of four basic graphical elements as described below: Flow Objects Flow objects are the main graphical elements to define the behavior of a Business Process. There are three Flow Objects: o Events o Activities o Gateways Connecting Objects There are three ways of connecting the Flow Objects to each other or other information. These Connecting Objects are: o Sequence Flow o Message Flow o Association Swimlanes There are two ways of grouping the primary modeling elements through Swimlanes: which are: o Pools o Lanes Artifacts Artifacts are used to provide additional information about the Process. There are four standardized Artifacts, but modelers or modeling tools are free to add as many Artifacts as required. The current set of Artifacts includes: o Data Object o Group o Annotation
Following table displays a list of the core modeling elements that are depicted by the notation: Element
Event
Description
An event is something that happens during the course of a business process. These events affect the flow of the process and usually have a cause (trigger) or an impact (result). Events are circles with open centers to allow internal markers to differentiate different triggers or results. There are three types of Events, based on when they affect the flow: Start, Intermediate, and End. An activity is a generic term for work that company performs. An activity can be atomic or nonatomic (compound). The types of activities that are a part of a Process Model are: Process, SubProcess, and Task. Tasks and Sub-Processes are rounded rectangles. Processes are either unbounded or a contained within a Pool. A Gateway is used to control the divergence and convergence of Sequence Flow. Thus, it will determine branching, forking, merging, and joining of paths. Internal Markers will indicate the type of behavior control. A Sequence Flow is used to show the order that activities will be performed in a Process. A Message Flow is used to show the flow of messages between two participants that are prepared to send and receive them. In BPMN, two separate Pools in the Diagram will represent the two participants (e.g., business entities or business roles).
Notation
Activity
Gateway
Sequence Flow
Message Flow
Association
Pool
Lane
Data Object
An Association is used to associate information with Flow Objects. Text and graphical nonFlow Objects can be associated with the Flow Objects. A Pool represents a Participant in a Process. It is also acts as a swimlane and a graphical container for partitioning a set of activities from other Pools, usually in the context of B2B situations. A Lane is a sub-partition within a Pool and will extend the entire length of the Pool, either vertically or horizontally. Lanes are used to organize and categorize activities. Data Objects are considered Artifacts because they do not have any direct effect on the Sequence Flow or Message Flow of the Process, but they do provide information about what activities require to be performed and/or what they produce. A grouping of activities that does not affect the Sequence Flow. The grouping can be used for documentation or analysis purposes. Groups can also be used to identify the activities of a distributed transaction that is shown across Pools. Text Annotations are a mechanism for a modeler to provide additional information for the reader of a BPMN Diagram.
Note: For the complete set of BPMN elements please refer to BPMN Specification Ver. 1.0 (released by www.bpmi.org)
Inputs Outputs Complexity No. of People Involved Duration of Business Process No. of Steps Frequency Capacity of Business Process Effort Time Cycle Time
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