3434

Modelio
Practical Guides

Practical Business Process Guide

Author:
Modeliosoft Consulting Team
Version:
1.0
Copyright: Modeliosoft

Modeliosoft
21 avenue Victor Hugo
75016 Paris

www.modeliosoft.com

Practical Business Process Guide

Introduction to Practical Guides
This set of Practical Guides is the result of hands-on experience gained by Modeliosoft
consultants. Eachguide is designed to facilitate model construction and to help you get the most
out of the Modelio tool in a given context. The practical guides are deliberately short, since the
aim is to provide essential practical information in just a few pages. The Modeliosoft consulting
team is at your service to help with enterprise architecture definition, business process and
software architecturemodeling, SOA, and to provide any other assistance you may need in your
IT projects.
Modeliosoft is pleased to provide a consulting/tool package. Find out more at
www.modeliosoft.com.
At www.modeliosoft.com, you can download the Modelio Free Edition tool, a user-friendly and
unlimited tool for UML modeling and business modeling (Enterprise Architecture, BPM, SOA
logical architecture and softwarearchitecture), completely free of charge.
At www.modeliosoft.com, you can also evaluate and purchase Modelio Enterprise Edition, and
discover the full functional richness of this tool: teamwork support, goal analysis, dictionary
definition, requirements analysis, code generation, documentation generation throughout the
entire project lifecycle, and so on.
The Practical Guides currentlyavailable are as follows:
Practical Use Case Guide
Practical Business Process Guide
Enterprise Architecture: Practical Guide to Logical Architecture
Practical Company Organization Modeling Guide
Other practical guides will be available soon. Please check our website for details.

Copyright Modeliosoft 2009
21 avenue Victor Hugo, 75016 Paris

Page 2

Practical Business Process Guide

Whatare business processes?
A business process is a sequence of actions carried out by different actors working together to
deliver a tangible result and bring added business value to the company.

The "Order product" business process (simplified)
For example, the aim of the "Order product" business process is to deliver the ordered product
within the specified timeframe and bill the customer.It should be noted that a business process model generally describes the business and not the IT
system. Some described actions are carried out manually, with no interaction with a software
component or application. For example, the "Deliver product" action can be carried out without
using any software elements.
A business process is transversal, and is generally based on several structures andapplications of
one or several organizations. For example, the trip set-up process integrates the travel agency,
the tour operator and the airline company.
In UML, business processes are represented using activity diagrams. However, users often prefer
BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation), which is seen as being easier to get to grips with.

Copyright Modeliosoft 2009
21 avenue VictorHugo, 75016 Paris

Page 3

Practical Business Process Guide

When and why to use business processes
Business process descriptions bring real business vision, and constitute an excellent formalization
and analysis tool when constructing systems. As such, they play a central role in today's company
information systems (banking, insurance, telecoms, and so on).
In the context of adevelopment project, they are above all used in business oriented act ivities
(requirements expression, specifications or analysis, depending on the terminology used).
Business process models are also an important part of companies' transversal activities
(urbanization, cartography, BPM and SOA).
However, some domains are less concerned by business process models (embedded systems, for
example, or...