A comparison of BPMN 2.0 with other notations for manufacturing processes

Abstract

In order to study their current practices and improve on them, manufacturing firms need to view their processes from several viewpoints at various abstraction levels. Several notations have been developed for this purpose, such as Value Stream Mappings or IDEF models. More recently, the BPMN 2.0 standard from the Object Management Group has been proposed for modeling business processes. A process organizes several activities (manual or automatic) into a single higher-level entity, which can be reused elsewhere in the organization. Its potential for standardizing business interactions is well-known, but there is little work on using BPMN 2.0 to model manufacturing processes. In this work some of the previous notations are outlined and BPMN 2.0 is positioned among them after discussing it in more depth. Some guidelines on using BPMN 2.0 for manufacturing are offered, and its advantages and disadvantages in comparison with the other notations are presented.