Building BPMs

The chapters in this part explain how to model your business processes in PowerDesigner®.

• Getting Started with Business Process Modeling
  A business process model (BPM) helps you identify, describe, and decompose business processes. You can analyze your system at various levels of detail, and focus alternatively on control flow (the sequence of execution) or data flow (the exchange of data). You can use BPEL, BPMN, and many other process languages.
• Process Hierarchy Diagrams
  A process hierarchy diagram (or functional decomposition diagram) provides a graphical view of the functions of a system and helps you decompose them into a tree of sub-processes.
• Business Process Diagrams
  A business process diagram (or process flow diagram) provides a graphical view of the control flow (the sequence of execution) or data flow (the exchange of data) between processes at any level in your system.
• Process Service Diagrams
  A process service diagram provides a graphical view of the services, operations, and interfaces available in your system.
• Simulating a Business Process Model with SIMUL8
  Simulation helps you to better understand the expected performance of your business processes before their implementation, by providing you with useful analysis metrics and assistance in business process optimization.
• Checking a BPM
  The business process model is a very flexible tool, which allows you quickly to develop your model without constraints. You can check the validity of your BPM at any time.
• Generating and Reverse Engineering Process Languages
  PowerDesigner can generate objects from a BPM and reverse engineer into an existing or new BPM.
• Generating Other Models from a BPM
  You can generate another BPM from your BPM. You can use the BPM to BPM generation to generate an analysis or collaborative BPM into an implementation BPM designed for the different orchestration process languages supported in PowerDesigner (BPEL4WS, WS-BPEL, and SOA).
• Importing Visio Diagrams into PowerDesigner
  Importing your Visio diagrams into PowerDesigner's rich metadata environment enables you to link your architectural objects with the objects that will implement them, and to profit from PowerDesigner's powerful impact and lineage analysis features. You must have installed Visio 2002 or higher and have selected to install the Visio plug-in from the PowerDesigner installer.