Příklady BPMN

Every diagram below is a complete process rather than a fragment, and each one is the smallest process that still forces one idea you cannot get from a symbol table. Read them in order and they build; skip to the one whose shape matches your problem and they stand alone.

1. Onboarding - two participants, and why the boundary between them changes what you are allowed to draw.
2. Expenses - a rework loop, which almost every real process has and almost no first diagram shows.
3. Support tickets - a deadline that changes the path.
4. Subscription renewal - a timer start event, and a participant whose internals are deliberately not modelled.
5. Returns - the inclusive gateway, on one of the few processes where it is genuinely the right answer.

If a symbol in any of them is unfamiliar, the symbol reference indexes every mark on this page.

The figure at the top of this article. A new hire accepts, the people team prepares a contract, and then two things happen at once: an induction gets booked and accounts get requested from a service desk the people team does not run.

The parallel gateway is doing real work here. It does not say "these could happen in either order" - it says both paths always run, and the join waits for both. If the induction is booked in a minute and the accounts take two days, the process sits at that join for two days, which is exactly the fact a diagram like this exists to make visible.

First drafts of approval processes are almost always straight lines: submit, check, approve, pay. Real ones bounce. Something is missing, somebody is asked for it, and the check happens again - and until that loop is on the page, the diagram is describing a process that does not exist.

Two details are worth copying. The return flow lands on Check receipts, not on the gateway: looping into the gateway is legal and reads as an unconditional cycle to anybody seeing it for the first time. And the corrective task sits below the gateway rather than below the approval, so its return runs back along an empty lane instead of crossing two live edges.

A flowchart can show a decision. It cannot show that something happens because a quarter of an hour passed. That is the gap BPMN's event set closes, and it is why a support process is one of the better arguments for the notation.

The timer here is an intermediate event in the flow, which makes the process wait. Two neighbouring shapes mean different things and are worth keeping straight: a timer on the boundary of an activity interrupts that activity when it fires, and an event-based gateway races the timer against something arriving, so whichever happens first wins. Which one you want depends on whether the work in progress should be abandoned.

A timer start event answers a question that trips up most first models: what starts this process? Not every process is started by a person or a message. A renewal starts because a date arrived, and saying so removes an imaginary actor from the diagram.

The collapsed pool is the other lesson. It would be easy to draw the processor's internal steps - authorise, capture, settle - and every one of them would be a guess about somebody else's system that ages badly. An empty pool with two message flows states precisely what is known and precisely what is not, and it stays true when the provider changes their implementation.

Most branches are exclusive - one path out - and most of the rest are parallel, where every path always runs. The inclusive gateway is for the case in between, and returns are a genuine instance of it: a damaged item might warrant a refund, a replacement, or a partial refund plus a replacement, and which combination applies is decided by the inspection.

This is also the gateway most likely to cause trouble, and the reason is on the right of the figure. The join has to wait for exactly the branches the split activated - no more, or it deadlocks waiting for a path that never carried a token. Every split needs its matching join, and adding a shortcut edge around one is how a process quietly stops completing.

The order to put these down in is in how to draw a BPMN diagram, and every mark used above is indexed in the BPMN symbol reference.