Visualizing BPM Case Flow

Background: Case Management in BPM is relatively new concept and very few BPM vendors currently offer Case Management.

Problem Statement: Without representing Case Flow in a visual sense, it is very hard for business community to apprehend what the system is achieving for them or if the system has been implemented as per business requirements or to business satisfaction.

Industry trend: While we have BPMN as industry standard for representing BPM flows, CMMN (Case Management Model Notations) is still evolving. Refer the following for the CMMN standard from OMG and an example:

http://www.omg.org/spec/CMMN/1.0/

http://www.opitz-consulting.com/fileadmin/redaktion/pdf/sonstiges/acm-in-practice_poster-a3_sicher.pdf

But these notations are not intuitive and boring, unlike BPMN notations. 

This is the reason, I have to come up with my own notations and way of drawing the case flow diagrams.

Here is a sample diagram, I have drawn:

As shown in the above diagram, the whole case flow is shown from left-to-right as an orchestration of case activities, which are driven by rules. Rules are fired by in-built rule engine, which listens to user and external events and adaptively fires activities to be made available to users as either mandatory or optional activities. 

The case is started as soon a customer request is received and set a set of milestones until the close of the case. A set of case activities are part of milestones. When these set of activities are completed, the milestone is marked as complete and a new set of case activities are made available to the user. When an external user or system event is received the Event Driven Network (EDN) receives the same and fowards it to the rule engine as input. The rule engine is setup with rules which fires upon receiving the events, which would start new activities, complete a milestone etc...

Note that the case flow diagram, which is shown above is purely a conceptual diagram, and in today's market BPM tools, as far as I know, this is not available to view out of the box unlike BPMN flows. But generally it is a good idea to show this kind of diagram in architecture/design diagrams to show a high-level view of how the case would flow after it has been setup. 

Note that, the case activities, milestones, events etc are created as per business requirements. As Case Management is new in the market, business users must understand the concept of Case Management and its advantages so that they can capture the requirements for Case.

Just to make the conversation complete, there a frequently asked question, which people ask me. Where is the BPMN flow after the BPM is setup as a case flow? 

Each case activities a self sustained BPM flow, which gets started when the user starts the case activity. A sample BPMN flow is shown below.

To start the above BPMN activity as a self contained case activities, which takes in some inputs and outputs.

Conclusion: In this discussion, I have tried to create a simple sample case flow diagram, showing how the case flow is generally setup and how the case flow diagram can be drawn. Case flow diagrams gives a high level view of how the business cases will flow end-to-end.