Other business process techniques.

Besides BPMN, there are other standard process modelling techniques. Many of them can also be used for software process modelling. Regardless of what is being modelled, the basic purpose remains the same: present a common representation of how information flows in a process to a wide range of stakeholders.

1 - Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN)

BPMN is a graphical representation of a business process through standard objects. It works pretty well for presenting business process information to stakeholders with little technical knowledge about process modelling, but it can also be implemented to show a greater deal of details which would be helpful to design engineers.

BPMN usesf the following building blocks;

-Flow objects: events (circles), activities (rectangles with rounded corners), and gateways (diamonds);
-Connecting objects: arrows, these indicate sequence flow (filled arrows), message flow (dashed arrows), and associations
-Swim lanes: pools (graphic container) and lanes (sub-partition of the pool)
-Artifacts: data objects, groups, and annotations

2 - Flowchart - Few standard symbols makes it a suitable choice to a wide audience since it requires little knowledge or understanding of how modelling works. While it relies heavily on sequential flows of actions, it's not optimised to depict the breakdown of individual activities. Its symbols are very similar to those used in BPMN, execpt that it uses rectangles with rounded edges for the start/end events, rather than an empty circle, while a parallelogram stands for data input and output.

3- Integrated Definition for Function Modeling  (IDEF) - IDEF is a family of methods that supports a paradigm capable of addressing the modelling needs of an enterprise and its business areas (IDEF, 2003). The IDEF family comprises different applications. For business process modelling, the most useful versions are IDEF0 and IDEF3. IDEF 0 is structured analysis and design technique a method for modelling actions, activities and decisions for organisations and systems. Effective IDEF0 models help to organise the analysis of a system and to promote good communication between the analyst and the customer. IDEF0 is useful in establishing the scope of an analysis, especially for a functional analysis. It's common to refer to IDEF0 as the box and arrow diagram, in which the box shows the function and the arrows going in and out of it indicate how operations are performed and controlled.  Activities can be described by their inputs, outputs, controls and mechanisms (ICOMs).

4- IDEF3 or Integrated DEFinition for Process Description Capture Method is a business process modelling technique, which comprises of a scenario-driven process flow description to learn how a specific system works. in other words, if you intend on finding out how the particulars of a certain system, you will do well to use IDEF3. IDEF3 enables capturing teh relationships between the actions of a given scenario and object state transition to capture the description of all possible states and conditions. The main purpose of IDEF3 is for a domain expert to express knowledge about how a system or process works.
As it may already be noticeable by now, description is a big part of IDEF3, being a keyword in this process modelling technique and having a specific meaning records of empirical observation (based on experience or common observations). Unlike description, a model is a proposed entity or state of affaris, supposed to represent objects and relations from a real-world system.
There are two IDEF3 description modes, process flow (captures knowledge of "how things work" in an organisation) and object state transition network (summarises the allowable transitions of an object throughout a particular process.).

5 - ARIS The ARIS toolset is a software tool for the depiction, upkeep and optimisation of business processes based on the ARIS framework. The ARIS toolset is split into 4 categories: control, data, organisational and functional.

6 -organogram- is a diagram that shows the structure of an organisation and the relationships of its parts and positions/jobs. As a diagram and process modelling technique, it's most efficient to depict hierarchy of organisational units. It can also be used to demonstrate the relationship of a department to another. Keywords frequently reserved for this modelling lanaguge include: organisational units, lines (to show hierachical structure), role, internal/external person and group.

7 - EPC - Event-driven process chain- An 'Event-driven process chain' (EPC) is a modeling language for describing business processes and workflows. EPCs can be used for setting up an enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation, and for business process improvement.

Event - Events are passive elements in event-driven process chains, describing how a function or a process works or which state they result in. In the EPC graph an event is represented as hexagon. In general, an EPC diagram must start with an event and end with an event.

Function - Functions are active elements in an EPC, representing tasks or activities within the company. Functions describe transformations from an initial state to a resulting state. In the event-driven process chain graph a function is represented as rounded rectangle.

Process owner - Process owner is responsible for a function and is usually part of an organisation unit.Represented as a square with a vertical line.

Organisation unit - Organization units determine which organisational unit is responsible for a specific function. Examples are "sales department", "procurement department", etc. It is represented as an ellipse with a vertical line.

8 - FAD (funciotnal allocation diagram) - the Functional Allocation Diagram (FAD) is used to depict the Enterprise Business Services and operations for a particular integration. The average FAD should depict how input turns into output, the execution and the reousrces to make this happen.