Can BPMN and EPC live together in peace and harmony?

Hello John,

there are certain points your consultant is probably trying to point out:

EPC and BPMN use the same terms, but there may be differences in what they are used for. E. g. an "Event" is quite differently used in BPMN and EPC. Certain difficulties you may have in EPC like "which process does the event belong to?" at the process interface do not occur in BPMN, because BPMN processes don't share events. They communicate via message flows.

I fully agree with your evaluation of the two notations. There may be different reasons for using both notations:

- different parts of the business have different legacy process assets, e.g. due to cultural background or M&A events

- You use EPC for the business level and BPMN in its full beauty for the technical design description, including backend service integrations and the like.

You definitely have to strip down the BPMN vocabulary for business-oriented processes. I have seen projects fail because business people started interpreting the technical details of the BPMN notation instead of focusing on describing their business need. They are not developers.

So regarding the confilicts: Listen to your consultant what he has to say about them and deal with them in a conscious way. Define what level of detail you want to have in each notation. Define how the two worlds shall be linked, when processes in both notations interact with each other.

Thank you M for that reply, makes sense so far.

I think the "conflicts" that we are worried about, are ARIS technical conflicts.  For example, if EPC uses a different "Responsible" connection from the one used in BPMN, with they both show up correctly in RACI chart?  My thought on that, would be to use the same "Responsible" connection in all models, and there should be no issue.  But the way that ARIS handles RACI in a BPMN model is a bit of a mystery to me so I can't make sure it is consistent.

My current thought is to use EPC for the "mid level" processes where we want to know important things like the Roles involved, the IT Tools used, the supporting/input/output documents, and the Busness Rules that apply; which do not show in the higher level VACD models.  Then if needed for detail level technical design description, for the purpose of RPA or any other purpose where this level of excruciating detail is needed, we can use BPMN.  If we did that, then in most if not all cases, the BPMN models would be for sub-processes of the EPC models.

Does that make sense / seem workable?

thanks again

John

There is no RACI in BPMN. That is out of scope of the BPMN notation, which is only a process notation. See chapter 7 of the spec. That is one reason, why EPC is more business-friendly. Best practice is to represent roles as Lanes in BPMN Collaboration Diagrams.

If you use the "Enterprise BPMN" model types in ARIS, you can directly have the "Responsible" role represented with a Lane symbol and every task or sub-process you place in the lane gets the same connection type you would use in an EPC.

With all those satellite objects you mention you are definitely better off with EPC. The big questionmark is, in what way BPMN may serve you well below that level. I could imagine that you model the BPMN stuff at the same level as the EPC but with more technical details. Link the two but don't reuse the EPC steps as tasks. This will cause confusion. So maybe as a first attempt use the delimitation of the EPC processes as the reference for the technical design of your processes in BPMN - so to speak as the logical design level corresponding to the business description.

By the way: Since SR14 you have the possibility to manage the relationships to the satellites of processes very much like you handle attributes. ARIS will manage the function allocation diagrams in the background for you. So the decision for/against EPC is more open.

Thanks again for the inputs.

Regarding the RACI -- I am referring to the RACI chart that is created by ARIS Connect for EBPMN and EPC models.  We want the full Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed roles to show correctly in the RACI chart in ARIS connect for all of our detail-level models where this is applicable.  As I understand it, these relationships are not shown directly in BPMN; rather the "Responsible" relationship is inferred from the pools and lanes, and Accountable / Consulted / Informed must be added with objects in the EBPMN model, or in a FAD assigned to each task on the BPMN model.  Do I understand that correctly?

Also, where can I find the "spec" for BPMN that you mention?  ("chapter 7")

Hello John,

indeed the BPMN specification does not prescribe what a "Lane" is supposed to represent, It might just as well represent the "supports" relationship from an application system to a process task. The interpretation is up to you. That is why in the initial ARIS implementation the "Lane" was simply an object representing this layout element, which made it difficult to connect any actual meaningful objects to it.

Fortunately this was remedied already quite some time ago by introducing the model types called "Enterprise BPMN...", which give you the same feature richness as "standard" BPMN 2.0 and additionally the opportunity to take roles, org. units or application system types represented as Lanes in the models. On top of the BPMN standard "belongs to" relationship to the Lane they will create the corresponding "Responsible" (aka carries out) connection type for organizational object types or "supports" for Application system types. That is the same connection you would use in an EPC to represent the "Responsible" relationship, so it will show in the RACI view as such. For the ACI roles I would recommend to use Function allocation diagrams. Since SR12 it is possible to litter your BPMN model with all sorts of satellites just like you would in an EPC, however the model graphic hasn't got much to do with BPMN, if you do that. You are certainly leaving the standard BPMN notation at that point. Since SR14 there is the Content type configuration, which allows you to maintain your satellite connections to documents, risks, data... whatever in the Properties panel just as if it were attributes of the object. ARIS will maintain the Function allocation diagrams in the background for you, but you do not need to worry about them. So this would be a good option for you to model the ACI connection types for your BPMN models.

BPMN specification: https://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/

So please distinguish between what is the BPMN standard notation and what ARIS adds on top of that: The opportunity to model all the resources of your enterprise in relation to your processes. The BPMN notation does not provide for this - even the representation of "Responsible" role as a Lane is a convention most people choose and which ARIS supports by making the "Lane" identical to the role object it represents.

Dear John,

M referred to chapter 7 in the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), Version 2.0 (omg.org).

And check out this video at 0:48 how to easily assign RACI in a BPMN model How to model a BPMN process - YouTube

Cheers
Rune

Thank you all for the additional inputs and information.  I see I have some homework and studying to do, hopefully it will all make sense to me soon!