“Less is more” carries the notion that simplicity and clarity lead to good design. This tiny phrase is attributed to the German-American architect and designer Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe (1886-1969). He was one of the founders of modern architecture, the last director of the famous “Bauhaus” and a proponent of the simplicity of style. This construction design rule is can be applied to software and model design as well.

IBM® offers a BPM modeling platform for the cloud: IBM® Blueworks™ Live, formerly named Lombardi Blueprint®. This new platform empowers process owners and business analysts to document business processes, collaborate, share information and drive business process analysis (BPA) for process improvements in their organization. The IBM® Blueworks Live™ tool supports BPMN™ 2.0 for modeling and can also import Microsoft® Office Visio® diagrams. However, BlueWorks Live™ is not designed to export process models back to Visio®.

The Oracle Business Process Analysis (BPA) Suite comprises Oracle Corporation software products that provide modeling and analysis of business processes based on the ARIS tool suite.  The BPA tool suite is used by business analysts and technical architects for modeling of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and implementation using the Oracle Fusion Middleware. The models from BPA suite can be converted to other tools such as Microsoft Visio or published to SharePoint.

People mostly believe that Microsoft® Visio® is just a simple drawing tool which is limited in scope when it comes to business process modeling and the complexities of business architecture. BPM-X® has enhanced Visio® by a smart repository approach so that the construction of a real business architecture is a breeze. As a result you can easily achieve a business and functional decomposition and structure your process diagrams into according to different levels of detail. In this way you may start from the overall enterprise perspective and end up on the implementation level with supporting IT systems and applications. And there are modeling languages like ArchiMate® and BPMN™ which help to visually express your enterprise and architecture using different viewpoints (diagrams).

Modeling or framework standards are very important for correctly describing semantics through models and thus establishing a good communication among different stakeholders. But regular everyday experience is teaching us that model and diagram interchange (MDI) with e.g. UML® models (via XMI) or BPMN™ models (via XPDL) does not always work well to receive high quality deliverables, to say the least. And please forget about round-tripping among tools. So MDI is usually a somewhat horrible exercise for architects or developers.

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The SAP Solution Manager is the standard tool to blueprint and document SAP ERP solutions.  It concentrates on standard SAP transactions and the scoping and customizing of ERP solutions. On the other side SAP BPM is the SAP tool to automate and execute business processes. Both tools are based on SAP NetWeaver, but they are not linked directly together. You may wonder how to customize your SAP solution and to combine them in a project with the new approach of BPM automation. BPM-X is the tool to link modeling tools, repositories and BPM tools. Different tools can be plugged into the BPM-X model exchange bus by specific adapters.

Microsoft Visio® is a very commonly used tool for the mapping of business processes. Many BPM modeling tools claim to have Visio import abilities, but the real functionality they offer is no more than a “tick the box” for answering a RFQ (request for a quotation). This seems to be designed more as a way to gain a foothold for submitting and winning  sales proposals rather than offering the really needed functionality of importing quality Visio diagrams.

IBM Rational® System Architect is a one of the leading EA and BPA modeling and analysis tools. It has great functionality; it supporting many standards such as BPMN 2.0 diagram types and famous frameworks like TOGAF 9, ArchiMate v2.0, DoDAF 2.0, MODAF 1.2, NATO Architecture Framework (NAF) 3.0, IAF v4 Integrated Architecture Framework, Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework 2.0 (FEAF 2.0) and last but not least the Zachman Framework. This rich functionality unfortunately, also builds complexity that is obstructive to efficient use by business analysts or project team initiatives like BPR (business process re-engineering) or blueprinting  of ERP solutions. These later teams and much prefer the easy use of Microsoft Visio® to map business processes or to scope existing best practice content for customer requirements.

At BPM-X we receive inquiries from organizations round the globe using tools from different vendors for enterprise architecture (EA), business process analysis (BPA) or business process management systems (BPMS). Even if a BPM platform vendor like TIBCO offers the complete stack of BPM tools, additional tools come into the game for e.g. for process mapping using SPARX Enterprise Architect or Microsoft Visio® with the need to interchange process model data.

There is an interesting report by Michael zur Muehlen, “Enterprise Architecture based on Design Primitives and Patterns, Guidelines for the Design and Development of Event-Trace Descriptions (DoDAF OV-6c) using BPMN”, already published in 2009 discussing about round-trip architecture, interoperability issues and architectural primitives of the DoDAF architecture framework.

The Object Management Group (OMG) has recently established the BPMN model interchange working group (BPMN MIWG). This new group has the mission, amongst others, to develop a test framework for an improved interchange of process models using the BPMN format among different tools which are using the BPMN 2.0 modeling language.

Modeling with BPMN™ 2.0 is nowadays a very common case for documentation and automation of business processes. However, the testing of complex models is not an easy task. BPM-X® processes BPMN™ models from tools like CAMUNDA, generates test cases and uses tools like HP ALM for test execution and automation.

IBM BlueWorks Live (Ex Lombardi Blueprint) is a BPM SaaS solution from IBM using the BPMN modelling standard from OMG. BlueWorks is used by many consulting firms and organizations to map business processes. Nevertheless, we get many requests to link BlueWorks with other tools, e.g. to share models with Enterprise Architecture tools like Sparx Enterprise Architect or simply to publish the BlueWorks diagrams into Microsoft Visio format.

Over the years the concepts of enterprise architecture and business process management have evolved, the number and complexity of frameworks are growing, new hypes and acronyms are popping up like crocuses in spring. All approaches are aiming to deliver better support for business, more agile IT and closing the much-cited gap between business and IT (just to mention some of the chief targets). But taking a real world view at enterprises, the majority of organizations are still far away from architecture’s wonderland.

Sparx Sparx Enterprise Architect (EA) is a modeling tool used by Enterprise Architects in many organizations. Over the time this tool has evolved from an UML/SysML tool to a full featured Enterprise Architecture tool supporting different frameworks (NIEM, CCTS, Zachmann, TOGAF or UPDM) or modeling languages like BPMN. On the other side Microsoft Visio is "the" diagramming tool for business users or analysts. In the following blog posts we research the interchange of model data and diagrams between both tools.

Sparx Systems™ Enterprise Architect is a widely used tool for process mapping and modeling just as HP ALM is the leading tool in the market for test management. Combining both tools proves the formula 1 + 1 = 3 to be true: benefit from both the added value of leveraging business process models for requirements management and generating model-based test cases.