What is BPMN?

BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) is an internationally standardized notation for graphically modeling business processes, maintained by the Object Management Group. It defines symbols for activities, events, gateways, roles (pools and lanes), and message flows, so that business and IT can read the same representation. BPMN models are both human-readable and technically executable.

Why does this matter?

In many organizations, BPMN is the language in which target processes are documented. That makes it the natural reference point for Conformance Checking: the as-is process reconstructed from data is compared against the BPMN model to determine deviations objectively.

What does this look like in practice?

An approval above €10,000 is modelled in BPMN as an exclusive gateway: a diamond with two outgoing paths labelled with the conditions. Because the symbols are standardised, the business reads the same diagram as the engineers who derive an executable workflow from it.

Not to be confused with

Not to be confused with a flowchart, whose symbols are neither standardised nor executable. Nor with the EPC, which solves the same task in a different notation and is used mainly in German-speaking countries.