BPMN

BPMN #

About #

Business process model and notation (BPMN) is an ISO standard, so there are many good resources available to learn more about it. You find some recommendations on this page. If you miss anything or know of any valuable resource that is not listed, don’t hesitate to give feedback or open a pull request for this page (click on the edit this page button at the bottom of the page).

You can find the current version of the specification as PDF file on the OMG page about BPMN. Note that is is absolutely not necessary to read through the specification when you want to apply BPMN in real-life!

Books #

Info Comment
Real-Life BPMN Real-Life BPMN by Jakob Freund, Bernd Ruecker, rated 4.4 of 5 stars, find it on Amazon I co-authored this book about BPMN and find it a pretty good and practical introduction into BPMN. While it covers the complete symbol set, it also gives you some advice on how to use BPMN successfully. It does not go into details on automation, but rather stops where Practical Process Automation starts.
BPMN Quick and Easy BPMN Quick and Easy by Bruce Silver, rated 4.6 of 5 stars, find it on Amazon An excellent introduction to BPMN too. Maybe especially interesting if you are tired of reading my stuff ;-)
BPMN Method and Style BPMN Method and Style by Bruce Silver, rated 4.3 of 5 stars, find it on Amazon The more elaborate version of the “Quick and Easy” book.

Modeling Tools #

This section lists tools that help you create BPMN models. Refer to the tools page for a curated list of tools that can also execute BPMN models.

The OMG Model Interchange Working Group (with the handy abbreviation MIWG) has a quite extensive list of tools that support BPMN, and also lists their coverage: BPMN Tools Tested for Model Interchange. This is a great resource to get a good overview.

As biased as I am, I want to highlight the two tools I use on a daily basis and that also helped me to create all models in the book:

  • Camunda Modeler: Free desktop modeler allowing you to model BPMN and DMN saving them as standard compliant XML files.
  • Cawemo: Hosted modeler that allows you to create BPMN process diagrams with all stakeholders involved to specify the workflow that should be automated (e.g share the model, model simultaneously, discuss, …)

Tutorials #

Get Started Guides To Execute Models #

There is more to come, but for the time being:

  • Camunda Cloud Get Started Guides: Model your first BPMN process and deploy it to the managed workflow engine in the cloud. You can implement service tasks via C#, Go, Java or NodeJS.
  • Camunda Platform Quick Start: Model your first BPMN process, download the Camunda Platform and deploy it there. You can then implement a service task via Java or Java Script.

Training Courses #

Being a ISO standard there are many BPMN courses available, actually most universities also teach BPMN.

BPMN training courses can vary in the intended target group, so for example there are BPMN trainings that target the business analyst, while there are also process automation trainings, targeting software developers, including a great deal of BPMN.

Typical BPMN trainings are around two to three day courses, and in non-pandemic times there is a good mixture of classroom trainings and virtual ones.

Many companies adopting BPMN even develop their own customized BPMN training focusing on exactly their needs and often shortened to one or two days.

Depending on your location, there might be localized trainings available, which to my experience can make sense in some regions, especially if you train roles that are not communicating in English every day.

Once again, I can only give my biased recommendation to the trainings my company Camunda provides. These ones I teached myself frequently and know that they are really good. I actually never attended any other BPMN training (as there weren’t any when I started).

Improve This Page! #

Please let me know if you know of any other great resource I should add here!