BPMN

BPMN stands for Business Model and Notation and is a symbolic modeling language consisting of a series of characters and standards similar to a flowchart, which can be used to describe and visualize business processes. By graphically modeling complex processes, they become easy to understand and easier to document. Resulting BPMN diagrams can be interpreted by humans and machines (BPMS tools), which helps to design, automate and monitor processes more effectively.

BPMN is not the only standard for representing processes graphically in a model. There are other standards such as flowcharts or event-driven process chain (EPC). But these standards are more and more replaced by BPMN because on the one hand, the BPMN models are easy to understand even without prior knowledge and, on the other hand, since BPMN 2.0 it is possible to bring these diagrams to life in a workflow engine. This has the advantage that a developer does not have to program the whole model, but only has to take care of the interfaces, which leads to much less effort in automation and allows easier adaptation and further development of the processes.