Business Process Modeling Notation (Bpmn): Getting Started with Visualization

When it comes to improvement, businesses around the world have pinpointed value streams and processes as low hanging fruit. You can analyze the steps taken to transform inputs, such as demand, into outputs, such as products and services, based on participants, resources, effort, cost, time, and other aspects to identify opportunities to enhance effectiveness and efficiency.

Once of these visualization techniques—Business Process Modeling Notation—is a popular standard. Let’s take a look at BPMN, including:

• A brief history
• Basic and advanced techniques
• Best practices

Why use visualization?

Writing for HBR, Scott Berinato stated that complex systems—business process workflows, for example, or the way customers move through a store—are hard to understand, much less fix, if you can’t first see them. Visualizing activities provides significant benefit in terms of:

• Better comprehension across the organization
• Ease of spotting bottlenecks and other constraints
• Identification of optimization and automation opportunities

Visualization has been around for many years, with the most popular standards evolving to support business processes, particularly in the digital age. Some popular visualization standards include:

• Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN)
• Unified Modeling Language (UML)
• Decision Model and Notation (DMN)

Interestingly, these three standards are managed by the Object Management Group (OMG) which is a non-profit consortium that develops enterprise modeling standards that enable powerful visual design, execution, and maintenance of software and other processes.

What is BPMN? The BPMN origin story

Business Processing Modeling Notation is a model and a notation that is exclusively applicable to Business Processes. Its purpose is two-fold:

• Providing businesses with the capability of understanding their internal business procedures in a graphical notation
• Facilitating the ability to communicate these procedures in a standard manner.

This enhances understanding of the performance collaborations and business transactions between members of the organization and other stakeholders, which leads to better ownership and empowerment. BPMN was primarily developed to support technical implementation of processes, i.e. process automation. As a standard, it has been applied by most process automation solution vendors.

According to Trisotech, the first version of BPMN was published in 2004 by the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), which merged with OMG in the following year. In 2006, OMG released a BPMN Specification document, before beginning the development of version 2.0 in 2010. BPMN v2.0 was released in 2013, and the latest version (2.0.2) was adopted by ISO as a standard through ISO/IEC 19510:2013.