Business Process Engineering

Week 4

Business Process Modelling & Notation

1. First Steps with BPMN
2. Branching and Merging
3. Exclusive Decisions
Process Modelling
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Business Process Modelling & Notation
— Process modelling helps to better understand the process and to
identify and prevent issues
— Thorough understanding is the prerequisite to conduct process
analysis, redesign or automation.
— BPMN:
◦ Process modelling using the BPMN language
◦ We will learn BPMN by introducing its symbols and concepts gradually

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Business Process Modelling & Notation
— A business process involves events and activities.
◦ Events represent things that happen instantaneously (e.g. an invoice has
been received)
◦ Activities represent units of work that have a duration (e.g. an activity to
pay an invoice).
— The most elementary form of relation is that of sequence, which
implies that one event or activity A is followed by another event or
activity B.

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Business Process Modelling & Notation
— Based on popular graphical flowcharts:
- Core set of notation elements
- Each core element has various subtypes

— A BPMN process model is a graph consisting of four types of

core elements:

start end sequence

event gateway flow
activity

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BPMN Core Elements
Activities capture work performed in a
process
◦ Different types of activities
activity

Events represent the process’ triggers

(start event) and outcomes (end
start end
event event
event).
◦ Different types of events
BPMN Core Elements
A start event triggers a new process instance start
by generating a token that traverses the event

sequence flow (“tokens source”)

An end event signals that a process instance has

end
completed with a given outcome by consuming event

a token (“tokens sink”)

BPMN Core Elements
Gateways capture forking and joining paths in
the control flow.
gateway ◦ Different types of gateways

Sequence flows represent the order in which

sequence activities and events will be performed.
flow They can be assigned a condition to distinguish
between alternative branches.
◦ Different types of flows
BPMN Branching & Merging
— Activities and events may not necessarily be performed
sequentially.
— The approval and the rejection of a claim are two activities which
exclude each other.
— When two or more activities are alternative to each other, we say
they are mutually exclusive.
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BPMN Branching & Merging
— The activities which are typically performed by two different
business units, are independent of each other and they do not
need to be performed in sequence: they can be performed in
parallel, i.e. at the same time.
— When two or more activities are not interdependent, they are
concurrent.
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BPMN Branching & Merging
— A split gateway represents a point where the process flow
diverges while a join gateway represents a point where the
process flow converges.

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BPMN Exclusive Decision - XOR
An XOR Gateway captures
— To model the relation decision points (XOR-split) and
between two or more points where alternative flows are
alternative activities, exclusive merged (XOR-join)

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— XOR-join merges two or XOR-split è takes one outgoing

more alternative branches that '(!"#$%&%"#
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may have previously been
forked with an XOR-split.
— An XOR gateway is indicated XOR-join è proceeds when one
with an empty diamond or incoming branch has completed
with a diamond marked with
an “X”.
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BPMN Exclusive Decision - XOR

Invoice checking process

BPMN Exclusive Decision - AND
— When two or more activities
An AND Gateway provides a
do not have any order mechanism to create and
dependencies on each other synchronize “parallel” flows.
(i.e. one activity does not need
to follow the other, nor it AND-split è takes all
excludes the other) they can outgoing branches
be executed concurrently, or
in parallel.
— The parallel (AND) gateway is AND-join è proceeds
used to model this particular when all incoming
branches have completed
relation.
BPMN Exclusive Decision - AND
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BPMN Exclusive Decisions

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BPMN Exclusive Decision - OR
A company has two warehouses, one in Amsterdam, the other in
Hamburg, that store different products. When an order is received,
it is distributed across these warehouses: if some of the relevant
products are maintained in Amsterdam, a sub-order is sent there;
likewise, if some relevant products are maintained in Hamburg, a
sub-order is sent there. Afterwards, the order is registered and the
process completes.
BPMN Exclusive Decisions - OR
BPMN Exclusive Decisions - OR
BPMN Exclusive Decision - OR

An OR Gateway provides a mechanism to create

and synchronize n out of m parallel flows.

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OR-split è takes one or more branches depending

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OR-join è proceeds when all active incoming

branches have completed
BPMN Exclusive Decision - OR
Business Process Modelling & Notation
— Recap:
◦ Activity
◦ Start Event
◦ End Event
◦ Sequence Flow
◦ Gateway:
◦ AND
◦ XOR
◦ OR

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