Summary: BPMN?s diagram semantics are expressive and precise, but the spec doesn?t tell you everything you need to know to create effective models. Here we go beyond the spec with nine tips for making your process diagram say exactly what you mean. Third of six parts. For text of the article, go to https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/70c51475-3b7b-2a10-248c-f4cc7b4dc52c
Summary: A brief summary of the BPMN notation. BPMN describes process orchestration in terms of activities (tasks and subprocesses) connected by sequence flows. Branches, splits, and joins in the flow are modeled by various gateway types. Events specify how processes respond to signals received from external entities or other parts of the same process. Other parts of the notation are loosely specified and used to add business context only. Second of six parts.
[Posted 6 Sept 2007 on BPMInstitute.org] One of the most powerful features of BPMN is the least appreciated? by modelers and tool vendors alike. I?m talking about subprocesses. Most of the process models I have seen would be much improved if they were used more liberally, and more effectively. In BPMN, a process is viewed as a flow of activities, and an activity ? a rectangle in the diagram ? can signify only one of two things: a task, meaning it has no subparts of interest to the model, or a subprocess, meaning the activity has subparts of significance to the model.
If there is one standard that the BPM world can unite around, it's BPMN. Today, even those vendors initially reluctant to adopt it can no longer ignore it. But what exactly are the factors that drive this acceptance? How satisfied are end users of BPMN with the notation? Do user experiences on BPMN match those by BPA tool vendors? Jan Recker from the BPM Research Group at Queensland University of Technology is undertaking a worldwide survey on the use of BPMN by process modelers to shed light into this question.
After 3 days of "what is it?" and "where it's going" and "how great it's gonna be," attendees at the Gartner BPM Summit this week finally got to hear "how to do it" on the afternoon of the last day. Normally only a few diehards stick around to the bitter end, and I guess you can't blame Gartner for giving this slot to the outside consultants. Also, I had to compete with 4 other How-To sessions from topnotch guys like Paul Harmon and Tom Debevoise.
Oldish threads sometimes take on a life of their own, and recent comments on a January post What is Case Management? have done just that. If you are interested in this important but mostly ignored corner of the BPM space, check it out. In addition to the G360 Case Manager product, it seems there is another product called Singularity that I need to know more about.
It's nuts to cram a 2-day course on BPMN into an hour and a half, but I guess I'm doing it anyway. If you're in San Diego at the Gartner BPM conference next week and staying around to the bitter end, check it out. I'm on Wednesday afternoon at 1:45. If you're interested in talking with me about the full course - either the online Flash video version or the 2-day classroom version, or possibly licensing it yourself - it's a good place to meet me.
I've been talking about it for a while, laboring over it for even longer. Now I'm announcing it: Process Modeling with BPMN, a comprehensive course on how to use the standard both correctly (per the OMG spec) and effectively - with a supplied best-practice top-down methodology - to model and analyze business processes.
If you've heard about BAM but aren't exactly sure what it is, tune into my webcast on Thursday January 11 at 10am PT/1pm ET. The registration link is here. The sponsor is EMC, and after my (vendor-neutral) introduction to the benefits of BAM and how it works, EMC will demo its ProActivity BAM now integrated with the EMC Documentum Process Suite.
The previous discussion leads naturally into simulation use case 3, which deals with Activity Based Costing. A number of users have asked me if simulation provided activity based costing, and I always said yes, since I assumed it could. But it's not built into the tools at all. This turned out to be a really interesting part of the training to develop. All completely original, since the modeling tool vendors don't really talk about it (or at least correctly), and the ABC literature doesn't mention simulation, either.
Activity Based Costing is not just determining the cost of each process activity from its active labor costs, or even its total direct costs. Yes you get that directly from the simulation model, as in use case 2. ABC is about allocating the indirect costs, both labor - management/supervisory, plus ancillary functions - and fixed overhead, like plant and equipment. You can't get that from the simulation model!
Or can you?