BPM Process Patterns using BPMN by Dan Atwood

Business analysts and developers new to BPM sometimes struggle with the art of discovering, modeling, understanding and explaining business processes. BPM Process patterns provide a time proven and simple technique to shorten the learning curve and improve productivity and quality of the processes designed.  The patterns described here were created using Oracle BPM’s BPMN process modeling tool.

Process patterns are example fragments of processes that show how to connect activities together to solve various and common workflow problems.  Like words that are combined to form sentences, these patterns are combined to form complete processes and illustrate some of the best thoughts on modeling business processes today.   Professor Wil van der Aalst’s Workflow Patterns article written in 2002 noted that processes have common and reusable patterns.  These process patterns are broken down into these six categories that gradually grow in complexity:

1. Procedural Patterns

2. Advanced Branching and Synchronization Patterns

3. Structural Patterns

4. Multiple Instance Patterns

5. State Based Patterns

6. Cancellation Patterns

Procedural Patterns

Sequence Pattern

This is the most common and obvious of all the patterns. When business analysts begin to model the way things work today ("As-Is" process) usually much of the process looks like activities strung together in a series. Instances (individual items of work flowing through the process) step through the activities one by one. Read the complete article here.

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