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Essential Process Modeling

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Fundamentals of Business Process Management
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Abstract

Process models help us to better understand a business process and to identify and prevent issues. This step towards a thorough understanding of business processes is the prerequisite to conduct process analysis, redesign, or automation. In this chapter we become familiar with the basic ingredients of process modeling using the BPMN language. First, we describe the essential concepts of process models, namely how process models relate to process instances. Next, we explain the four main structural blocks of branching and merging in process models. These define exclusive decisions, parallel execution, inclusive decisions, and repetition. We then show how to model business objects and resources involved in a process. Finally, we learn how to use sub-processes to reduce the model’s complexity, and how to reuse these sub-process models from within different process models.

Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.

George E.P. Box (1919–)

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Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mendling, J., Reijers, H.A. (2018). Essential Process Modeling. In: Fundamentals of Business Process Management. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-56509-4_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-56509-4_3

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-56509-4

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