With a firm grip on its title, BPMN remains the premier way to design and implement business processes. It’s intuitive, easy, and it can also be fun.
Learn what BPMN is, what its key elements and best practices are, and how to scale business processes using BPMN if you’re in Fintech.
BPMN stands for Business Process Modeling Notation. It’s a standard method of creating efficient workflows using visualization, popular among businesses worldwide. The idea is that you wrap up your business processes into a diagram, like the one below, to make it easily and quickly understandable across your teams and business partners.
The short answer is: because it gives you a competitive edge. Let’s add more details.
If this many pages don’t seem alluring, below, you’ll find a primer on BPMN objects and diagrams, followed by best practices for using this business language.
Scale your processes beyond visual, with an expert tech partner.
BPMN shapes (symbols or elements) come in four groups: process flow objects, pools and swimlanes, data objects, artifacts, and connection objects.
Process flow objects include tasks or activities, events, and gateways—they represent the action in your process.
Data objects are non-executable elements; it’s the information shared during the process (emails, documents, etc.).
Artifacts are groups of objects (outlined in shapes), or comments with important information regarding objects and the flow. Unlike data objects, which are more like desktop shortcuts, comments are the actual text.
Connection objects link other objects and groups of objects to each other and show direction.
Pools and swimlanes serve to organize processes—they are the canvas.
Advice tested with time and our experience.
When you’ve picked the process to depict, single out the Actors, the Objects, the Time, the Place, and the Goal. The process will tie it all together in a clear “How.”
Always define Start and End Events to show how the process should begin and complete.
Event: Quote sent
Activity: Send quote
Incorrect: Make and print check
Correct: Make check -> Print check
Incorrect: Decline due to high risk
Correct: Decline
It’s better to fit the whole process on one page to simplify the view and prevent certain parts from being unnoticed.
Think of the stakeholders you prepare the diagram for. Will they need a detailed or a simplified version of it? Which is a better fit for you or your CEO? You’ll need both variants in some cases, so it’s easier to create the two right away.
Just like a poorly written sentence, diagrams can miss parts, contain mistakes, or be hard to follow and understand. Also, it can have a specific sequence of actions expressed in several ways, which may make it hard to spot.
Tip: Use a tool like bpmnlint or Camunda to conduct automated testing. Tools will help you detect and correct flaws and make your modeling patterns unified and easy to recognize.
Who tested all the bugs out? The testers of our SDT.
→ Learn what's SDT
BPMN helps you polish what you’ve got. Our Fintech expertise, coupled with years of experience in solution development, can give you even more advantage.
We have proven our ability to help increase client satisfaction and save time and costs, whether building an all-in-one platform for advisors from scratch or integrating with custodians. Want to meet us and learn what we can do for you?
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