Abstract

The majority of large and mid-sized companies are active in Business
Process Management (BPM). Documenting business processes
is a key task of BPM, but the variety of process modeling
languages makes it difficult to determine ‘the best’ one. Basically,
the suitability of a process modeling language depends on the
companies’ requirements. In this paper we adopt a bird’s eye view
on the issue: By an empirical investigation of 130 public
companies from all over the world and any sector, we gather the
common requirements of process modeling languages and use
them to assess the most popular ones (i.e., BPMN, UML Activity
Diagrams, Event-driven Process Chains). Our results show that
these languages are (1) equally expressive and (2) presumably
equally understandable concerning the common core notion of
‘business process’; thus, they can be used interchangeably.
However, the BPMN is the most complex process modeling
language.

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