The basic idea of the BPMN approach

Here, we will learn how and why the BPMN approach was introduced. Business process modeling and documentation with tools is nothing new – there have been tools available since the early 1990s. Whenever you need to describe a business process, the first question is, how do you depict the various components of a business process that needs to be described? In the past, there have been several approaches to achieve this.

One of the older approaches was introduced by the company SAP AG in the early 80s, which was one of the first approaches to document business processes in a standardized manner. It is known by its original German name, Ereignisgesteuerte Prozesskette (EPK). The English term for this is an Event-Driven Process Chain (EPC).

Also, the ISO consortium had another definition of how business processes should be documented in a visual standard – this standard is today one of the most commonly known and used, which we learned...