Mastering BPMN 2.0 for enhanced business process design

Before you can optimize a business process, you must understand it. And the first step to understanding is to model, map, visualize or otherwise describe the process (or processes) you’re dealing with.

There are many tools at your disposal, and plenty of jargon to make sense of, so it can be a confusing proposition. Let’s take a look at one of the core concepts in this area, BPMN, and break down what it is, why it matters, and how it enables better process design.

What is business process model and notation?

Business process model and notation (BPMN) is a global standard for the graphical representation of business processes — much like a flowchart — with its own set of symbols and diagramming elements.

But if we want to really understand BPMN’s role in process design today, we must take a quick detour through the history of business process management, the evolution of process-mining, and the journey to process improvement that BPMN 2.0 helps to advance. 

The origins of BPMN modeling

BPMN emerged as a process-discovery capability in the early days of business process orientation (BPO) and business process management (BPM). Back then, process discovery was a largely manual task involving consultants, subjective interviews, trawling through documentation, and piecing together process maps — often in the form of sticky notes. (We say “back then” but actually this kind of manual, static, and error-prone approach to process discovery is sadly very much alive in some organizations today.)

The rise of process-mining (and more recently Process Intelligence) has helped businesses modernize their approach, swapping the static, two-dimensional view of their processes for a living, breathing, three-dimensional picture.

As Professor Wil van der Aalst, “the Godfather of process-mining”, has written about the transformation of BPM and process discovery: “The uptake of process mining transformed Business Process Management (BPM) research completely. It is no longer acceptable to waste time and money on creating BPMN models that say little about the actual processes.”

So process-mining brought process discovery into the twenty-first century. But that doesn’t mean business process modeling notation is no longer relevant — quite the contrary.

How is BPMN 2.0 used in process improvement?

Process-mining technologies modernized the process-mapping methods that came before it, including BPMN. But what does that look like in practice?

The Celonis Process Intelligence Graph, which is the connective tissue at the heart of Celonis’s process mining platform, helps you understand how objects and events interact, how processes are interconnected, how your business runs, and how it can run even better.

It enables you to visualize a process through a BPMN graph with both exclusive gateway and parallel gateway semantics. This looks like a “subway map” of your business, showing multiple process lines and their interaction points.

This subway map unlocks process optimization for companies like Reckitt. “We initially just wanted to have better control and visibility in Finance,” said Kuldeep Dudeja, IT & Digital Director. “We’re talking about billions if not trillions of data points here. [But we] quickly realized that the power of Celonis goes far beyond process visibility. It really has become this cross-functional, unbiased layer.”

The other key factor that makes Process Intelligence possible — seeing as you asked — is the object-centric data model, which lets you bring multiple interconnected processes together in a single data model for that end-to-end picture.

BPMN 2.0 vs BPMN: What’s the difference?

This section explores the differences across historic versions of BPMN — for the more technical readers and practitioners out there.

BPMN 2.0 is the latest formal version of the BPMN standard, as maintained by the Object Management Group. More precisely, the current version is actually BPMN 2.0.2 (at the time of writing). 

In the specification documentation, the changes from BPMN 1.2 to BPMN 2.0 are summarized as follows:

“There have been notational and technical changes to the BPMN International Standard.

The major notational changes include:

• The addition of a Choreography diagram

• The addition of a Conversation diagram

• Non-interrupting Events for a Process

• Event Sub-Processes for a Process

The major technical changes include:

• A formal metamodel as shown through the class diagram figures

• Interchange formats for abstract syntax model interchange in both XMI and XSD

• Interchange formats for diagram interchange in both XMI and XSD

• XSLT transformations between the XMI and XSD formats

Other technical changes include:

• Reference Tasks are removed. These provided reusability within a single diagram, as compared to GlobalTasks, which are reusable across multiple diagrams. GlobalTasks can be used instead of Reference Tasks, to simplify the language and implementations.”

This information can be found on page 479 of the 502-page document — in case you want to dig into some serious detail.

Now let’s look at how this evolution of process discovery capabilities has led to real-world business improvements and major time savings.

BPMN vs other business process modeling tools 

Far from the only method of plotting out your business processes, here are some of the most common alternative business process modeling techniques, and how they compare:

• Event-driven process chain (EPC) — While EPC uses similarly simple flowchart symbols, it typically requires more of them than compact, streamlined BPMN, leading to bulkier, sprawling business process diagrams. It’s also restricted to top-down flows, whereas BPMN can be visualized horizontally.

• Unified modeling language (UML) — UML is more sprawling still, with 14 diagram types, which can make it hard to find one that’s accessible business-wide. It also shows interactions between ‘objects’ rather than processes, so you’re able to map the business system a customer purchases from, for example, but can’t capture the stages and actions that actually happen within that.

• Universal process notation (UPN) — UPN gets rid of BPMN’s symbol system, instead using the more conventional flowchart design of boxes and arrows. Although BPMN uses more elements, each UPN arrow has descriptive notes attached that provide extra context around dependencies and what’s triggered an action.

• Integrated Definition for Function Modeling (IDEF) — One of the most complex process-modeling methods, IDEF diagrams contain detailed logic and inputs that can make them less intuitive to parse at first glance, with multiple arrows feeding into a single function or activity. BPMN is better suited to automating processes, whereas IDEF provides a detailed analytical overview of how your processes stand.

Process intelligence helps BPMN team save thousands of procurement hours

A. O. Smith, a provider of energy-efficient water heating and treatment products, turned to Celonis for help optimizing their Order-to-Cash and Purchase-to-Pay processes. The BPMN team used Celonis to measure and analyze their end-to-end supply chain — something that would traditionally require huge amounts of manual process mapping.

With Celonis, A. O . Smith saved thousands of hours of work, and gained the ability to continuously and objectively identify optimization opportunities across all business units. “Celonis was very helpful in moving our organization forward towards data-centric, data-driven process improvement,” says Matthew Rodgers, Senior Director of Business Solutions.

Getting set up with Celonis took less than a day, and within three months A. O. Smith’s Procurement team saved more than 2,000 hours of manual effort.

The fast track to business performance

By establishing a common language for process-modeling, BPMN 2.0 makes it easier for business analysts, business professionals, and process experts alike to understand how work flows through an organization. Process Intelligence uses BPMN-style ‘subway maps that provide a rich but simple expression of your processes, and are a fast track to improved business performance.

To see where all this could take your business, join us for a short Introduction to Celonis Process-Mining demo.

Bill Detwiler

Senior Communications Strategist and Editor Celonis Blog

Bill Detwiler is Senior Communications Strategist and Editor of the Celonis blog. He is the former Editor in Chief of TechRepublic, where he hosted the Dynamic Developer podcast and Cracking Open, CNET’s popular online show. Bill is an award-winning journalist, who’s covered the tech industry for more than two decades. Prior to his career in the software industry and tech media, he was an IT professional in the social research and energy industries.