To show the business process model in the diagram editor, in the Project Explorer view, in model project that you created in the
Import the business process model section, double-click the model named
Business Process.bpmx. The diagram editor opens, and the model should look similar to the following image:
This business process model describes a purchasing process that a company wants to automate. The parts of the model are described below:
- The outermost rectangle represents a pool, which is named "Purchasing." The pool represents the business process as a whole.
- The enclosed rectangles, which are named "Scheduling," "Shipping," and "Invoicing," are called lanes. These lanes represent subdivisions of the business process that separate entities perform. The entities might be people, IT resources, or a mixture of both. You can think of each lane as a role that someone plays as part of the overall business process.
- In the "Shipping" lane, the circles, which are labeled "start" and "end", represent a start event and an end event, respectively. They represent the starting and ending points of the business process.
- The rounded rectangles represent tasks. The tasks represent the steps that each lane (role) in the process performs.
- The grey lines represent sequence flows. These lines indicate the order in which the tasks are performed.
- The diamond shapes that contain a plus sign (+) represent parallel gateways. The gateways indicate the start or end of parallel execution. All the outgoing flows from a parallel gateway can be performed in parallel. All the incoming flows to a parallel gateway must reach the gateway before the outgoing flows can continue.
You can specify parallelism without a parallel gateway. For example, in the "Shipping" lane, the "Process Schedule" task has two outgoing flows, which indicates that each task can be performed in parallel.
At this point in the tutorial, you can either close the business process model, or keep it open.