Flowchart Design - Business Process Management
Business process management (BPM) is a systemic approach for capturing, designing, executing, documenting, measuring, monitoring, and controlling both automated and non-automated processes to meet the objectives and business strategies of a company.
Through BPM, processes can be aligned with the business strategy, and so help to improve company performance as a whole thanks to the optimization of processes within business divisions or even beyond company borders. What the end-to-end process means is from start to finish. The goal is to understand and thus assess and improve an entire process not just its components.
What is the digital maturity of my processes?
What is the digital maturity of my processes?
Let’s take a closer look at the three main stages of top-down modeling.
Let’s take a closer look at the three main stages of top-down modeling.
1. The high-level diagram
1. The high-level diagram
The high-level diagram only contains the main activities of the process.
Ideally, it fits on a single page and the diagrams contain 10 activities or fewer. These activities are modeled as reduced sub-processes.
We start by considering only the happy path first, using all kinds of activities, gateways, and events to bring the process from its initial state to its end state.
We can now add the exception / alternative paths. The end states of these paths are displayed as separate end events in the high-level diagram.
2. Underlying level charts
2. Underlying level charts
For each activity in the high-level diagram, we create a child-level diagram to show its internal details. Each is created as a separate diagram, linked to the top-level diagram. Child-level diagrams must have a none start event. Their activities can also be collapsed sub-processes, which would be expanded into another layer of child-level diagrams. All input or output flows to a sub-process in the top diagram level should be traceable down to the child-level diagram. For example, if a sub-process is followed by a gateway, the sub-process must have as many end states as the branches of the gateway and one of them must match the label of the gateway.
3. Adding details
3. Adding details
The key to this step is if you only need to add valuable information to a diagram.
How do you know if something is of value?
It should be useful in the business context for the process and it should clarify or show how the process interacts with other entities.
Message flows, for example, are not required by the specifications. However, they do provide information about the interactions between participants, which makes them valuable, so drawing them is always recommended.
To be coherent.
This would improve communication, which is one of the main goals of business process modeling.
How to design a process diagram
- Process diagrams focus on the flow and sequence of a single business process.
- Collaboration diagrams focus on the interaction (exchange of messages and their sequence) between participants.
- Conversation diagrams provide an overview of the interactions between participants.
- Choreography diagrams focus on how participants exchange messages to coordinate their interactions.
How to design a process diagram
- Process diagrams focus on the flow and sequence of a single business process.
- Collaboration diagrams focus on the interaction (exchange of messages and their sequence) between participants.
- Conversation diagrams provide an overview of the interactions between participants.
- Choreography diagrams focus on how participants exchange messages to coordinate their interactions.