BPMN-Beispiele
Fünf Prozesse von Anfang bis Ende gezeichnet - Onboarding, Spesen, Support-Tickets, Abo-Verlängerung und Retouren - jeder ausgewählt, weil er eine Sache erzwingt, die keine Symboltabelle vermittelt: einen zweiten Teilnehmer, eine Nacharbeitsschleife, eine Frist, eine Blackbox oder eine Verzweigung, die wirklich beides ist.
11 Min. LesezeitBPMN 2.04 von 6
01How to read the five
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.
- Onboarding - two participants, and why the boundary between them changes what you are allowed to draw.
- Expenses - a rework loop, which almost every real process has and almost no first diagram shows.
- Support tickets - a deadline that changes the path.
- Subscription renewal - a timer start event, and a participant whose internals are deliberately not modelled.
- 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.
021. Onboarding, across two participants
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.
032. Expenses, and the loop nobody draws
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.
043. Support tickets, and a deadline
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.
054. Subscription renewal, against a black box
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.
065. Returns, and a branch that is genuinely both
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.
In one line each
- 01Sequence flow inside a pool, message flow between pools. A second pool is a claim about who you do not control.
- 02A process with no rework loop is usually a process nobody has checked against reality.
- 03Loop back to the task that repeats, not to the gateway that noticed.
- 04A timer start event says a date began this, not a person.
- 05An empty pool is knowledge, not omission: these messages are known, the internals are not.
- 06Inclusive gateways must be balanced - every split needs its join, or the process hangs.
- 07One page, roughly fifteen flow objects. Past that, collapse a subprocess.
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.
07Häufige Fragen
Welches BPMN-Diagramm zeichnet man am besten zuerst?
Einen Prozess, den Sie selbst ausführen, mit einem Pool, einem Startereignis, vier bis fünf Aufgaben, einem exklusiven Gateway und zwei Endereignissen. Ein einziger Pool nimmt die schwerste Regel der Notation heraus - dass Sequenzfluss keine Pool-Grenze überschreiten darf - und zwei benannte Endereignisse erzwingen die Frage, wie der Prozess enden kann.
Wie zeichnet man eine Nacharbeitsschleife in BPMN?
Als Sequenzfluss vom Ende der Korrekturaufgabe zurück auf die Aufgabe, die wiederholt werden muss, nicht zurück auf das Gateway, das den Fehler entdeckt hat. Beides ist zulässig, aber die Schleife ins Gateway liest sich für Ungeübte wie ein unbedingter Zyklus, während die Schleife in die Aufgabe genau zeigt, welche Arbeit erneut anfällt.
Wie modelliert man eine Frist in BPMN?
Mit einem Zeitereignis, und welches, hängt davon ab, was passieren soll. Ein Timer am Rand einer Aktivität unterbricht sie nach Ablauf und lenkt den Token auf einen Ausweichpfad. Ein Timer als Zwischenereignis im Sequenzfluss lässt den Prozess schlicht warten. Konkurriert die Frist mit etwas Eintreffendem, ist ein ereignisbasiertes Gateway die richtige Form.
Braucht jedes BPMN-Diagramm mehr als einen Pool?
Nein, und die meisten sollten keinen zweiten haben. Ein zweiter Pool lohnt sich nur, wenn das Diagramm wirklich einen Teilnehmer zeigen muss, den Sie nicht steuern und dem Sie nichts vorschreiben können - Kunde, Lieferant, Zahlungsdienstleister. Eigene Abteilungen in getrennte Pools zu legen ist fast immer falsch; das sind Lanes in einem Pool.
Wie viel Detail gehört in ein BPMN-Diagramm?
Eine Seite und etwa fünfzehn Flussobjekte. Darüber hinaus verfolgen Leser keine Pfade mehr, sondern suchen den Kasten mit ihrem Namen. Ist der Prozess wirklich grösser, lautet die Antwort: ein zugeklappter Unterprozess mit eigenem Diagramm, damit jedes Bild in einem Massstab bleibt, den ein Mensch im Kopf behält.
Passend dazu