Chapter 3: Essential Process Modeling

Contents
1. First Steps with BPMN
2. Branching and Merging
3. Business Objects
4. Resources
5. Process Decomposition
6. Process Model Reuse
7. Recap
Business Objects (aka artifacts)

Can be:
▪ Physical or digital information artifacts (e.g. an order on paper, an invoice on PDF)
▪ Physical material (e.g. a box containing the ordered goods)

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Our Order-to-cash process, again

Send
invoice

Confirm Archive
Items in order order
stock Order
fulfilled
Check stock
Ship goods
availability
Purchase
order Items not in
received stock
Reject order
Order
rejected

The purchase order document serves as an input to the stock

availability check against the Warehouse DB. Based on the
outcome of this check, the status of the document is updated,
either to “approved” or “rejected”. If the order is approved, an
invoice and a shipment notice are produced. The order is then
archived on the Orders DB.
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Business Objects in BPMN

A Data Object captures an artifact required

Purchase
order
Invoice
(input) or produced (output) by an activity.
▪ Can be physical or electronic
Emit
invoice

A Data Store is a place containing data

objects that must be persisted beyond the
Oracle CRM Client info duration of a process instance.

Retrieve client It is used by an activity to store (as output)

information
or retrieve (as input) data objects.

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Solution
Invoice
Purchase
Purchase
Order
Order
[approved]
Purchase Purchase Send [approved]
Order Order invoice
[checked]

Confirm Archive
Items in order order
stock Order
fulfilled
Check stock
Ship goods
availability
Purchase
order Items not in
received stock
Reject order
Order Orders DB
rejected Shipment
notice
Warehouse DB

Purchase
Order
[rejected]

The purchase order document serves as an input to the stock availability check against the Warehouse
DB. Based on the outcome of this check, the status of the document is updated, either to “approved” or
“rejected”. If the order is approved, an invoice and a shipment notice are produced. The order is then
archived on the Orders DB.
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Do data objects affect the token flow?
Exercise 3.5
Is there any missing data
object or data store in the
example below?
Do we always need to model data objects?
BPMN Text Annotations

A Text Annotation is a mechanism to provide additional text information to the model

reader
▪ Doesn’t affect the flow of tokens through the process

Includes packaging For blocked invoices

Clear vendor
Ship goods
line items

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Exercise 3.6

Put together the four fragments of the loan assessment process that
you created in Exercises 3.1–3.4.

Hint. Look at the labels of the start and end events to understand the order
dependencies among the various fragments. Then extend the resulting
model by adding all the required business objects. Moreover, attach
annotations to specify the business rules behind i) checking an application
completeness, ii) assessing an application eligibility, and iii) verifying a
repayment agreement.