Chapter 2 Getting Started with Business Process Modeling

Introducing Business Process Modeling

Business process modeling is a set of technologies and standards for the analysis, design, implementation and execution of business processes. It enables business analysts and managers to analyze a system in order to rationalize and optimize it or to model a new system.

A business process can represent the work of a person, a system, or the process of a partner company.

The PowerDesigner Business Process Model (BPM) is a graphical analysis of a system using the standard symbols and language notations for process design, deployment, execution, maintenance, and optimization. The BPM focuses more on business processes than on data, although data flows can be modeled. It allows you to identify business processes, choreograph, and implement them. You can use the BPM to model for three types of business process languages:

Analysis languages — to describe the organization of a system without any implementation details.
Orchestration (or execution) languages — to describe the implementation of business processes as Web services or applications and define how they can be connected to accomplish specific tasks.
Collaborative languages — to describe the choreography of business documents in a binary or multi-party collaboration.

For information about these languages, see BPM process languages.

With this product, you can:

Create as many interconnected business process diagram as are needed to describe your system to a suitable level of granularity
Generate code for Sybase WorkSpace Business Process, ebXML BPSS, ebXML CPA, BPEL4WS, or WS-BPEL
Reverse engineer code from ebXML BPSS, BPEL4WS, or WS-BPEL
Simulate your model with the Simul8 application
Generate automatic PowerDesigner reports to document your model
Import a Process Analyst Model (PAM) version 6 into a Data Flow Diagram