Overview
Businesses use EPC diagrams to lay out business process work flows, originally in conjunction with SAP R/3 modeling, but now more widely. There are a number of tools for creating EPC diagrams, ARIS Toolset of IDS Scheer AG, (Now taken over by Software AG ), free modeling tool ARIS Express by IDS Scheer AG, ADONIS of BOC Group, Mavim Rules of Mavim BV, Business Process Visual ARCHITECT of Visual Paradigm, Visio of Microsoft Corp., Semtalk of Semtation GmbH, or Bonapart by Pikos GmbH. Some but not all of these tools support the tool-independent EPC Markup Language (EPML) interchange format. There are also tools that generate EPC diagrams from operational data, such as SAP logs. EPC diagrams use symbols of several kinds to show the control flow structure (sequence of decisions, functions, events, and other elements) of a business process.
The EPC method was developed within the framework of ARIS by Prof. Wilhelm-August Scheer at the Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik at the Universität des Saarlandes in the early 1990s. It is used by many companies for modeling, analyzing, and redesigning business processes. As such it forms the core technique for modeling in ARIS, which serves to link the different views in the so-called control view.
To quote from a publication on EPCs: "An EPC is an ordered graph of events and functions. It provides various connectors that allow alternative and parallel execution of processes. Furthermore it is specified by the usages of logical operators, such as OR, AND, and XOR. A major strength of EPC is claimed to be its simplicity and easy-to-understand notation. This makes EPC a widely acceptable technique to denote business processes."
The statement that EPCs are ordered graphs is also found in other literature, but is probably a misformulation: an ordered graph is a(n undirected) graph with an explicitly provided total node ordering, while EPCs are directed graphs for which no explicit node ordering is provided. No restrictions actually appear to exist on the possible structure of EPCs, but nontrivial structures involving parallelism have ill-defined execution semantics; in this respect they resemble UML activity diagrams. Several scientific articles are devoted to providing well-defined execution semantics for general EPCs. One particular issue is that EPCs require non-local semantics, i.e., the execution behavior of a particular node within an EPC may depend on the state of other parts of the EPC, arbitrarily far away.
In the following the elements used in EPC diagram will be described:
Read more about this topic: Event-driven Process Chain