What is an Event-driven Process Chain (EPC)?

The Event-driven Process Chain (EPC) is a modeling notation that represents a process as a strict alternation of events and functions, linked by logical operators (AND, OR, XOR). It originated in the early 1990s at Saarland University and spread through SAP R/3 and ARIS across German-speaking countries. Its defining characteristic is the strict alternation: every event is followed by a function and every function by an event.

Why does this matter?

In many German companies, existing process documentation still exists as EPCs – frequently in ARIS. Anyone introducing Process Mining therefore almost always encounters EPC models as the target reference and has to reconcile them with the flows actually measured.