Thursday, August 14, 2014

Modeling Business Processes

Once the business processes are identified, the next step is to detail the business processes. The detailing of business processes helps in getting better insight into how the things work in the organization. The techniques of modeling employed can be used in understanding the current business processes and can also be used for depicting the changed/reengineered processes.

There are numerous techniques to depict business processes and tools supporting them. However one key characteristic that I always look for is the simplicity. Simplicity in depicting and simplicity in understanding. In that respect I feel simple flowcharts are good enough to cover the requirement. The elements of flowchart are as follows:
  • Circle - Start/End of process.
  • Rectangle - Step in a process.
  • Rhombus - Decision points
  • Arrow - Direction of the flow of process.

For the sake of completeness we will discuss one of the modeling techniques that are used:

BPMN

BPMN stands for Business Process Modeling Notation. It is a standard modeling technique adopted by many tools vendor now. It has elaborate notations to handle quite complex business processes.
Also have a look at website of BPMN

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