Organizations are always pursuing improvements in the way they work in order to increase efficiency and reduce errors. This requires analysis and continuous improvement of their working methods, which may include very structured workflows in predictable situations, as well as protocols to respond to dynamic situations where it is impossible to prescribe a fixed process. Recognizing these varied requirements, members of the Object Management Group® (OMG®), an international, open membership, not-for-profit technology standards consortium, have produced three successive, powerful and complementary standards, which together can model the range of working methods used across most organizations. This “triple crown” of process improvement standards offers support for process specification (BPMN™), case management (CMMN™) and decision modeling (DMN™).
Of course, there are many producers of low-code platforms that offer their own alternative standards, approaches and products to solve all the same problems that the Object Management Group® standards were developed to solve. However, Nectain team believes that following best practices and standards is the only right way. We use practical experience of dozens of companies that we have accumulated for many years. The experience of many is always greater than the experience of one. Therefore solutions based on broader and richer experience always have a significant advantage. The Nectain low-code platform (using the Camunda workflow engine) fully supports and follows the Object Management Group® standards and invites you to make the right choice.
Read more about the Object Management Group® standards that the Nectain low-code platform supports
The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a visual modeling language used for analyzing business applications and defining enterprise process workflows. It is an open standard notation for graphical flowcharts that allows the clear and consistent documentation of an organization’s business processes, ensuring that all relevant stakeholders, including process owners and business users, are involved in the process. BPMN provides comprehensive and intuitive notations that can be easily understood by technical and non-technical stakeholders. Business process modeling has many benefits for organizations, such as:
Being an industry standard developed by the OMG consortium, a not-for-profit industry group
Providing businesses with the capability of defining and understanding their procedures through Business Process Diagrams
Bridging the communication gap between business process design and implementation
Being simple to learn yet powerful enough to depict the potential complexities of a business process
Understanding how a business operates is the first and most critical step towards business process improvement. Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) provides a graphical representation of business workflows that anyone, from business analyst to stakeholder, can easily understand, aiding in business process analysis and improvements. Any process described with BPMN is represented as a sequence of activities performed according to specific business rules.
Organizations are constantly seeking to improve their efficiency and reduce errors by analyzing and continuously improving their work methods, which may include very structured workflows in predictable situations, as well as protocols to respond to dynamic situations where it is impossible to prescribe a fixed process. Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) is a graphical notation used for capturing work methods that are based on the handling of cases requiring various activities that may be performed in an unpredictable order in response to evolving situations. CMMN expands the boundaries of what can be modeled with BPMN, including less structured work efforts and those driven by knowledge workers. Using a combination of BPMN and CMMN allows users to cover a much broader spectrum of work methods.
Here are some reasons why we need CMMN in addition to BPMN:
Traditionally, the research and practice of business information systems focuses on well-structured business processes. However, many business processes are difficult to model, especially knowledge-intensive tasks such as incident management, consulting, or sales.
Much of the process cannot be fully specified at the start, since it requires information that only becomes available during the project.
In the context of ad-hoc processes, the next step is never determined, and execution cannot be controlled by classical process-based information systems.
A certain goal and providing possibilities to choose from is more important than the way to achieve the goal itself.
The Decision Model and Notation (DMN) is a modeling language and notation for the precise specification of business decisions and rules. DMN is easily readable by the different types of people involved in decision management, including business people who specify the rules and monitor their application and business analysts. DMN is designed to work alongside BPMN and/or CMMN, providing a mechanism to model the decision-making associated with processes and cases.
Here are some of the benefits of using DMN to model your organizational decision-making:
It helps all stakeholders understand a complex domain of decision-making using easily readable diagrams
Provides a natural basis for discussion and agreement on the scope and nature of business decision-making,
Reduces the effort and risk of decision automation projects through graphical decomposition of requirements,
Allows business rules to be defined simply and reliably in unambiguous decision tables
Simplifies development of decisioning systems using specifications that may be automatically validated and executed,
Provides a structured context for the development and management of predictive analytic models,
Enables the development of a library of reusable decision-making components.
BPMN, CMMN, and DMN can be used independently
Automation of industrial and office workflows with low code and maximum freedom