Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is the de facto standard for modeling organizational workflows and business processes. With the latest release of BESSER, BPMN joins our growing family of supported modeling languages, enabling users to model not only software structures and behaviors but also the business processes that drive them.

Business processes are everywhere. Whether processing an insurance claim, handling a customer support request, approving a purchase order, or managing patient care in a hospital, organizations rely on workflows that coordinate people, systems, and decisions. Capturing these processes effectively is essential for communication between stakeholders, documentation, analysis, and automation. BPMN has become the dominant standard for this purpose, offering a graphical notation that can be understood by both business experts and technical teams.

One of the recurring challenges in software projects is the gap between business requirements and software implementation. Business analysts often describe how a process should work, while developers focus on implementing the supporting software. Unfortunately, the artifacts used by both groups are frequently disconnected, resulting in misunderstandings, inconsistencies, and costly rework.

BPMN was designed to address this challenge by providing a common visual language for describing business processes. It enables stakeholders to model:

• Activities
• Events
• Decision points
• Parallel execution paths
• Actors and responsibilities
• Message exchanges between participants

The result is a shared understanding of how a business process operates before implementation begins.

The BPMN editor in BESSER provides an intuitive drag-and-drop modeling experience that allows users to design process models visually, directly from the web-based environment.

One of the key aspects of this development is that BPMN is not just a graphical notation implemented in the editor. Behind every BPMN diagram lies a BPMN metamodel implemented using B-UML. This means that BPMN models are represented as structured model instances rather than graphical artifacts. By grounding BPMN on top of B-UML, BESSER provides:

Try yourself to create your first business process in BESSER by going to editor.besser-pearl.org

There are already a few templates available so that you don’t need to start from scratch.

Stay tuned for more incoming news! (A hint here)