Chapter 4 Building an Analysis Business Process Model

Processes (Analysis BPM)

A process can be the design of a service (implementation process) or the invocation of a manual or automated action, like "getting money from an incoming order", or "building a software system according to the specifications" for example. When the process gains the control, it performs the action, then, depending on the result of the action, the flow is passed to another process. A process can be viewed as an action to reach a goal.

A process must have one input flow and one output flow at least.

A process can be atomic or decomposed:

An atomic process does not contain any sub-processes. It is called process in a BPM, or sometimes activity. It has the following symbol in the diagram:
A decomposed process uses sub-processes to describe its actions. They are represented in a sub-diagram. A decomposed process has the following symbol in the diagram:

For more information about decomposed processes, see Decomposed processes and sub-processes.

Activity processes in an analysis BPM do not detail the way they are implemented but rather insist on their functional aspects. Implementation details are defined in the executable languages.

For more information about executable processes, see section Processes in an executable BPM in chapter Building an Executable BPM: Managing Data and Choreography.

The following example shows the process of product order and shipment in a business process diagram.

Reusing existing processes

You can use internal and external shortcuts of processes to reference your model.

For more information about shortcuts, see chapter Managing shortcuts in the General Features Guide.