Business Process Management (BPM)

The BPM module allows documenting, modeling, and analyzing the organization's business processes. It combines visual BPMN 2.0 diagrams with maturity assessments and reporting.

Note

The BPM module can be enabled or disabled by an administrator in Settings. When disabled, BPM navigation and features are hidden.

Process Navigator

The Process Navigator organizes processes into three main categories:

• Management Processes — Planning, governance, and control
• Core Business Processes — Primary value-creating activities
• Support Processes — Activities that support core business operations

Filters: Type, Maturity (Initial / Defined / Managed / Optimized), Automation level, Risk (Low / Medium / High / Critical), Depth (L1 / L2 / L3).

Cards with a published BPMN diagram show a flow icon — click it to open the diagram full-screen without leaving the navigator (or jump from there to the full flow editor).

Column layout: the toolbar carries a column picker — one, two or three columns — so you can widen the process cards or fit more of a row on screen. A row never stretches across more columns than it has processes, and the choice is remembered between visits. The choice cascades into the nested levels too, one column fewer per level, so drilling down no longer squeezes deep processes into slivers.

Publishing it: the Process Navigator can be published as a read-only web portal, so people without a Turbo EA account — new joiners, auditors, partners — can browse the process house and open each published BPMN flow.

BPM Dashboard

The BPM Dashboard provides an executive view of process status:

Indicator	Description
Total Processes	Total number of documented business processes
Diagram Coverage	Percentage of processes with an associated BPMN diagram
High Risk	Number of processes with high risk level
Critical Risk	Number of processes with critical risk level

Charts show distribution by process type, maturity level, and automation level. A top risk processes table helps prioritize investments.

Process Flow Editor

Each Business Process card can have a BPMN 2.0 process flow diagram. The editor uses bpmn-js and provides:

• Visual modeling — Drag and drop BPMN elements from the palette: tasks, events, gateways, lanes, pools and sub-processes. The … entry at the bottom of the palette opens a searchable Create element menu that reaches every BPMN element type — message, timer, signal, error and escalation events, transactions, event sub-processes, call activities, send/receive tasks, data objects and data stores (shortcut N). The + entry on a selected shape's context pad opens the matching Append element menu (shortcut A)
• Starter templates — Choose from 7 pre-built BPMN templates for common process patterns, including a two-pool Collaboration template with message flows (or start from a blank canvas)
• Element extraction — When you save a diagram, the system automatically extracts all tasks, events, gateways, lanes, data objects and message flows for analysis. Events keep their kind — a message start event is listed as one, with the name of the message it receives — and send/receive tasks carry the message they exchange. Extracted elements are listed in process-flow order — following the sequence and message flows of the diagram, starting from the start event — rather than grouped by element type. Steps inside a loop are kept together, a sub-process's contents are listed directly beneath it, and data objects and data stores come last
• Element colors — Select one or more elements and use the paint bucket button on the context pad to apply a color. Colors are stored in the BPMN file itself, so they also appear in the read-only viewer, exports, and printouts
• Properties panel — The panel on the right (toggle it with the sliders button in the toolbar) edits what a shape cannot show: the element's name and documentation, the Message, Signal, Error or Escalation an event refers to, a sequence flow's condition, and multi-instance markers. Documentation entered here is shown in the process navigator and the read-only viewer

Pools and message flows

A process that spans several parties — a customer and the company, two departments, a partner system — is modelled as a collaboration: one pool per party, connected by message flows. Add a second pool from the palette (or start from the Collaboration template), then draw a message flow between the two pools with the global connect tool, or from a send task, a message end event or a message throw event in one pool to a receive task or message event in the other. Name the message in the properties panel so it reads the same wherever it appears.

Element Linking

BPMN elements can be linked to EA cards. For example, link a task in your process diagram to the Application that supports it. This creates a traceable connection between your process model and your architecture landscape:

• Every named task, event and gateway of the published flow is a row of the Process Steps & Elements table below the diagram (a draft has the same table under Pre-link Elements, applied when the draft is approved)
• Click the Application, Data Object or IT Component cell of a step and pick the card — the picker browses the inventory, so nothing is typed by hand
• The link is stored on the step and creates a relation between the process and the card, so it is visible in both the process flow and the card's Relations tab
• The Business Process column links a step to the process it hands over to — see below
• The same five links are offered in the editor while a draft is open: a Linked cards group in the properties panel, and a Link cards entry on the context pad that opens a menu of them
• On the diagram itself a linked step wears one small dot per linked card type under its name, in that card type's colour, in the editor and the read-only viewer alike — names are kept off the canvas; click the step to see them, or hover a dot

Linking a step to a process

A step often hands over to a process that exists in its own right — one with its own diagram, owner and lifecycle, typically reused from several places. Any step can say so: a task, a sub-process, an event or a gateway links to a Business Process card, and you never enter a process id by hand:

• The properties panel shows a Linked cards group on every step, one row per link — Business Process, Application, Data Object, IT Component, Organizations — each with Choose, Open (which drills down into the linked card) and Clear
• The context pad of a selected step carries a Link cards entry listing the same five, for when the panel is collapsed. A data object or data store offers the Data Object link alone, as in the table
• The steps table of the published flow (and the pre-link table of a draft) has the same link in its Business Process column, and the chip there drills down into the linked process's Process Flow tab. Data objects and data stores are not steps, so their rows show a dash

BPMN has one construct that is another process: the call activity, a task drawn with a thick border that invokes a process defined on its own. An embedded sub-process is the other way to group steps, but it belongs to the diagram it is drawn in; the Method & Style rule is simple: if the process exists independently, use a call activity. Turbo EA treats it as the native case — placing a call activity asks which process it calls, and the link is stored in BPMN's own called element, so other tools read it. Every other step stores the link as a Turbo EA attribute in the diagram instead.

Publishing a flow that contains a linked step creates a calls relation between the two processes — the linked process's Relations tab reads is called by, and the Dependencies view draws the call graph. A diagram imported from another tool keeps that tool's own process reference; the steps table shows it as a hint (references Process_X) until you pick the matching process in Turbo EA.

One set of links

The editor and the tables show the same links, so a step reads the same wherever you look at it:

• Inside a draft, what you set wins — in the editor or in the Pre-link Elements table, they are one store — and the diagram's own process reference is the fallback for a step you have said nothing about. Clearing a link clears it, including at publish.
• A published flow stays approved while its links are edited in its elements table: that is metadata on top of a signed-off diagram, not a reason to approve it again.
• A draft created from the published version starts from the links the process has at that moment. A draft already open keeps its own, so somebody else's edit cannot change a diagram you are working on.

Message flows

The message flows of the published diagram are listed under the elements table, each showing what it connects — a task, an event or a whole pool on either end. Link a message flow to the Interface card that carries it. Like organization links on steps, this is informative only: no relation is created between cards.

Linking Organizations

The Organization column in the step table links steps to Organization cards, right next to Application / Data Object / IT Component. Unlike those single-value links, a step can be linked to several organizations — pick them one at a time and remove them individually. Step links are informative only — they document which organizations are involved in a step without creating any relation between the cards; Business Process ↔ Organization relations are managed separately on the card's Relations tab. Lane names remain plain free text from the diagram and are not connected to Organization cards. The Process × Organization Matrix in BPM Reports aggregates these links across all processes.

Approval Workflow

Process flow diagrams follow a version-controlled approval workflow:

Status	Description
Draft	Being edited, not yet submitted for review
Pending	Submitted for approval, awaiting review
Published	Approved and visible as the current version
Archived	Previously published version, superseded by a newer approval
Withdrawn	Previously published version, unpublished on purpose

Submitting a draft creates a version snapshot. Approvers can approve (publish) or reject the submission.

Who can approve

Approving or rejecting a submitted revision needs the Approve or reject submitted BPMN flow versions permission, or the Process Owner stakeholder role on the process itself. Being able to edit drafts is not enough.

Changed in 2.43.0

Earlier releases accepted the general BPM edit permission here, so any member could approve any process flow — including a revision they had submitted themselves a moment earlier. If people in your instance approve flows today with only BPM edit rights, either grant them Approve or reject submitted BPMN flow versions in Admin → Roles, or assign them as Process Owner on the processes they sign off.

Withdrawing a published version

An approval given by mistake can be undone without deleting the process. Withdrawing requires the Withdraw (unpublish) a published BPMN flow version permission, which no role holds by default — an administrator grants it in Admin → Roles, or on the Process Owner stakeholder role in Admin → Metamodel.

Once the permission is granted, the published version gains a Withdraw button. Withdrawing asks for a written reason, and then:

• moves the revision to Withdrawn — it is never deleted, and never sent back to draft
• keeps the original approval on record: the Archived tab shows the revision, who approved it and when, alongside who withdrew it and why
• records the withdrawal, with its reason, in the card's History tab
• opens a copy as a new draft at the next revision number, so you can correct the diagram and put it back through submit → approve
• leaves the process with no approved flow until that draft is approved
• leaves the extracted process steps and their card links untouched

Keeping the withdrawn revision and editing a copy is deliberate: it means the exact diagram an approver signed off stays retrievable, which is what a quality system expects, while you still get a working copy immediately.

Any archived or withdrawn version can be picked up again at any time with Create new draft from this on the Archived tab, which clones it to a fresh draft at the next revision.

Process Assessments

Business Process cards support assessments that score the process on:

• Efficiency — How well the process uses resources
• Effectiveness — How well the process achieves its goals
• Compliance — How well the process meets regulatory requirements

Assessment data feeds into the BPM Reports.

BPM Reports

Three specialized reports are available from the BPM Dashboard:

• Maturity Report — Distribution of processes by maturity level, trends over time
• Risk Report — Risk assessment overview, highlighting processes that need attention
• Automation Report — Analysis of automation levels across the process landscape
• Process × Organization Matrix — Which organizations execute steps in which processes, with per-organization filtering and a per-process step drill-down (built from the informative step links; card relations are not included)