BPMN

What is BPMN?

BPMN stands for Business Process Model and Notation. It is an OMG and ISO standard to design and document business processes in a graphical notation. You can find more details about the specification at bpmn.org.

The basics of BPMN

BPMN uses a graphical notation to let the user designs and explains its business processes, the main four components are:

Graphical Notation	Description
	Activities are displayed as round rounded-corner rectangle and represent what work has to be done. Tasks are a really good start point to understand how activities works.
	Gateways are represented as diamond shape and used to split and merge the flow. You can find more details about the different types of gateways in our current implementation here.
	Events are displayed as circles and used to trigger actions like starting a flow instance. Read the following sections get started with events: - Start and Stop Events - Timer Events - Message Events - Boundary Events - Link Events
	BPMN objects within your process are connected to each other with a sequence flow which are designed by a solid arrow. Messages can be sent to other processes with a message flow, shown as a dashed line.

Advanced objects

After being familiar with the previous elements, you may want to take a look at the advanced objects

Graphical Notation	Description
	Sub Processes are a specific type of activity that are used to make diagrams cleaner by encapsulating business process inside a business process. Take a look at the Sub Processes. page to know how to use it.
	Call Activities are a specific type of activity that are used to call another business process that is contained inside a separate process diagram. Take a look at the Call Activities. page to know how to use it.
	Pools and Lanes show who should perform a task and are represented as a rectangle, one pool can contains one to many lanes. See the specific Pool and Lanes page.
	Message Flow allows you to have two or more processes interact by passing messages between processes Messageflow page.