On: February 5, 2007
It was quite some time that i had been doing process mapping armed with nothing more than Visio and its Basic Flowchart Shapes Stencil. Seemed good enough.
But as i walked into one of the biggest enterprise wide Process Mapping excersises I was introduced to System Architect ( a product from Telelogic). And very quickly i realized i what i was missing. To add to it, i was enthrusted the task of converting the existing visio maps to confirm to BPMN.
I would have loved to present a Before-After comparision here but i m not sure if this blog allows pictures to post. But some of the points are outlined below:
1- Uniformity: The process maps made by various individuals varied to a great extent in the way they treated the flow and representation of business logic. But BPMN outlines clear guidelines for representation of business flows.
2- The Basic Flowchart stencil definitely lacks some of the very useful shapes, the most significant being:
2.1- Gateways(OR/XOR/AND): with the simple decision box that it provided it was very difficult to represent the actual dependency of one of the inputs for an activity.
2.2- Presentation of Exception/Compensation events: Conditions and business flow to handle Exceptions and Compensations are so much easier to represent in BPMN.
3- Proper Layering or Leveling of process and sub-processes is much easier once you get the knack of the Parent child relationships defined by BPMN.
In visio we had been using pre-defined process boxes to show shift of process flow but in many cases it had resulted in redundancies and clear input or start points not being clear.
Thats it for the first post... I would continue soon
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