Chapter 2 Getting Started with the Business Process Model

Introducing Business Process Modeling in PowerDesigner

Business process modeling enables business people to analyze and orchestrate processes within their organization in order to rationalize and optimize operations.

Analysis business process modeling Business process modeling provides a way of visualizing complex processes within an organization through a graphical representation of activities and their interdependencies. Most of the time, this analysis highlights redundant or outdated processes that are hard to eliminate mainly because of the difficulty of performing changes in hard-wired expensive IT systems.

Orchestration business process modeling Business process modeling also provides a way to quickly build flexible, responsive systems that are able to exploit an existing software infrastructure.

PowerDesigner Business Process Model (BPM) fully supports both aspects of the methodology with different types of business process languages:

You can design an analytical BPM using the Analysis business process language.
You can choose among different orchestration languages also called executable languages (BPEL4WS, Sybase WorkSpace Business Process, and so on) to design process implementation. Eventually, you can also design collaborative BPMs when you need to analyze the exchange of messages between partners in top-level processes.

BPM and enterprise modeling

In the enterprise modeling context, you can use the PowerDesigner BPM to better track flows of data within an application. You can use the Conceptual Data Model (CDM) or the Physical Data Model (PDM) to design relational data, import these data into a BPM, and then attach them to the processes of your system. You can also proceed the other way round identifying data among processes and then exporting information in a CDM or a PDM. The data import / export feature is also available for linking data to classes and attributes in an implementation Object Oriented Model (OOM).

Use cases

Different BPM use cases are developed in this chapter to help you identify your needs in terms of business process modeling. The type of the BPM comes from the process language attached to this model (see What is a BPM?):

Using the Analysis BPM for identifying processes and data flows within your organization . You build a process hierarchy diagram to identify processes then create a business process diagram to further define and rationalize processes. From the business process diagram you can export data in other types of models, simulate process operation, and build a report on these processes.
From Analysis to Executable BPM for implementing processes . You generate the Analysis model into a new BPM for an executable language. You can choose to start implementation using the SOA executable language then generate into a new BPM for an executable language. Check the generated model to verify that it is compliant with the target executable language. You can then import Web services and start implementing processes in your model before generating the code corresponding to the target language.
Reverse engineer BPEL4WS files from other applications . After having reverse engineered the BPEL4WS files into a new model, you can change the target language of the model to an executable language BPM, fine tune the model in order to make it compliant with the current target, implement processes and generate the code corresponding to the model.
Design a collaborative BPM using ebXML BPSS . This language allows you to describe all the binary collaborations that the process plays with all partners. You should start designing the top-level process in a top-level diagram, then you can define the choreography of binary collaborations, business transactions and business document flows. You can then generate an XML file that describes the collaboration, the XML file is compliant with the ebXML BPSS notation and becomes a communication vector for business partners.