In the world of business process management, the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) emerges as a powerful tool designed to bridge the gap between business process design and intelligent automation. BPMN is an industry standard for easy visualization of business processes. Making it easier for businesses to understand, analyze, and enhance their workflows. At Stekz, we leverage BPMN through our innovative platform MyStekz, which we use to build tailor-made software platforms for our customers. This blog post explores the basics of BPMN, its use cases, how your business can benefit from it, and how we at Stekz use BPMN to take our customers’ processes to the next level.

The basics of BPMN

Suppose you own a restaurant and you want to map out the process of creating a marketing campaign. Firstly, you would need to define the roles required to complete this task. In this simplified example, you could have a marketer, designer, copywriter, and an automated system.

The process diagram as a whole is called a pool, and each horizontal field is a lane. The roles are represented on the left, and each lane portrays the actions for its corresponding role. Each process has a start- and endpoint, represented by circles. The rectangles in each field correspond to an action being taken. As you can see, this process is very simple and easy to follow. The need for a campaign kicks off the process, the marketer creates the objectives of this campaign, passes it along to the copywriter who writes appropriate text, and so on until the process is complete. Of course, there is much more to BPMN, but these are the foundational principles upon which you can map out every process in your organization. 

Why BPMN?

BPMN is used across various industries to clearly and concisely map out processes. It’s proven to be an invaluable tool for process assessment, identifying bottlenecks within a process, and standardizing company information. Key use cases include:

Business Process Improvement: You can use BPMN to identify inefficiencies in your business’ workflows and design more effective processes. By mapping out each step of the process accurately and running simulations with changing parameters, such as resources or demand, the bottlenecks holding back the process begin to surface. At Stekz, we take advantage of our unique platform MyStekz to map out our customers’ processes in BPMN then look for suitable optimizations only wherever needed. Working this way assures us that we are tackling the right issues while also giving us insights into the type of solutions required.

Software Development: BPMN helps in visualizing processes during the design phase of software projects, ensuring that all stakeholders have a clear understanding of the requirements. Gone are the days where the decision-makers and developers communicate in different languages. BPMN offers a simple and effective way for each member to participate in the conversation. MyStekz builds on this idea by allowing all users to upload various file formats directly onto the platform, edit them, and work on problems together. This means that information can be placed in the right context, so it gains meaning and is easy to access.

Compliance and Risk Management: BPMN can help your business ensure its processes comply with regulations and standards, leading to the identification and mitigation of risks. The clear presentation of processes ensures that all regulations are followed and potential risks are identified in time. Besides, having a clear understanding of the internal processes is key to staying compliant with regulatory requirements.

Training and Communication: BPMN provides clear, standardized visualizations of processes, making it easier to train new employees and communicate complex workflows across departments. At Stekz we have used BPMN to visualize every single recurring process throughout our organization, which has made it much easier to onboard new talent, communicate upcoming changes, and overall have better discussions as to how we can optimize our own workflows.

How MyStekz Leverages BPMN

Our innovative platform MyStekz fully leverages the capabilities of BPMN to provide advanced business process mapping and optimization for our customers. MyStekz offers a comprehensive platform where businesses can:

Visualize and analyze processes: Using BPMN, MyStekz allows us to create detailed, standardized diagrams of our customers’ processes alongside them, ensuring clarity and consistency, enabling deep analysis of workflows, and helping identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.

Collaboration on processes: With MyStekz, all stakeholders can easily understand and engage with process maps and supporting documents, bridging the gap between business and IT. Supported by features such as Google Drive support, revision reviews, history of BPMN diagrams, and tracking any changes between different versions.

Orchestrate processes: With our custom process orchestration engine SPEX we are able to actually run BPMN processes. The diagrams are no paper tigers. We keep track of the instances of every process and its tasks. The optional integration of SPEX  into MyStekz environment makes it easy to design, deploy, run, monitor, and manage your running processes. An all-in-one factory for process optimization and Intelligent Automation, all based on BPMN.

 

Conclusion

BPMN has proven to be an essential tool in business process management. Its ability to depict clear, standardized visualizations of complex processes makes it invaluable for companies seeking to improve efficiency, ensure compliance, and enhance communication across departments. 

At Stekz, we harness the power of BPMN through MyStekz to drive innovation and efficiency in our client’s business processes. Contact us to learn how MyStekz can help you revolutionize your workflow management and achieve your business goals.