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Abstract
This paper summarizes the current knowledge of business process modelling languages, which is increasingly important also in the agri-food industry. It describes the history of business process modelling, currently mostly used alternatives - UML, BPMN, EPC and recaps their strengths and features in which they outperform the others. As demonstrated all three notations can adequately model business processes. They do however differ in some specific features. In some aspects, each of the languages always outperforms the others. Important is that except of some general objective features where the languages differ, there is also a lot of subjective perception of how the single notations perform.
Keywords
Business Process Modelling, UML, BPMN, EPC.
Kožíšek, F. and Vrana, I. (2017) "Business Process Modelling Languages", AGRIS on-line Papers in Economics and Informatics, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 39 - 49. ISSN 1804-1930. DOI 10.7160/aol.2017.090304.
Introduction
Business process management (BPM) is an important topic for any organization nowadays. For each business goal, an organization has a set of activities, which must be undertaken. Business Processes are then a way to organize these activities and understand their interdependencies. (Weske, 2012; Pradabwong et al., 2015)
Importance of BPM is also increasingly seen in the agri-food industry. As Verdouw (2010) discusses one of the drivers for improved business process management is the market changes. Agri-food companies need to be increasingly flexible in the demand-driven supply chains.
Wolfert (2010), Vorst (2005) and Novák (2016) claim that the increasing demands of government, consumers and business partners are driving agri-food companies towards more knowledge based operations, where ICT and BPM play an important role.
As discussed by Panagacos (2012) BPM in an organization has more functions and benefits which it can achieve:
- Function analysis - evaluates different activities executed by different parts of organization,
- Service analysis - identifies manual processes for possible automation,
- Process analysis - assesses end-to-end processes to identify improvements,
- Information analysis - defines the flow of information between stakeholders and optimizes it,
- Workflow analysis - assesses data workflow between systems.
This article describes the different modelling languages and their strengths for different purposes. Three most common business-modelling languages were used - Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Event-Driven Process Chains (EPC). Example...