How to Animate a BPMN Business Process?

Effective communication is paramount during business process analysis to foster consensus and understanding among stakeholders. A well-structured presentation can effectively convey complex ideas concisely, making them more accessible and engaging for all participants in the analysis process.

In this tutorial, we will explore the use of animation tools to create compelling and engaging presentations that can help illustrate key concepts and ideas in business process analysis. By incorporating animation and other visual elements, you can create more engaging and interactive presentations, which helps build consensus, enhances understanding among stakeholders, and facilitates more effective decision-making.

Business Process Presentation - The Problem

When presenting a business process model, some individuals prefer using a slideshow with a projector, explaining it with a laser pointer. Others might open diagrams directly in Visual Paradigm, manually navigating (scrolling) through the diagram with a mouse. Both approaches, however, can lack dynamism.

Whether studying a business process diagram from Visual Paradigm, a slideshow, a handout, or a projector, you are essentially interpreting a dynamic process from a static image. The process isn't actively running within the image; it's being simulated in your mind. Consequently, the depth of learning from these static representations of workflows can be limited. Furthermore, you might easily overlook potential process flows in complex scenarios or those with numerous conditional paths.

Preview this Tutorial on YouTube

To assist you in completing this tutorial, we recommend watching the video below. The video highlights the tutorial's key steps and primary concepts. Watching it should make completing this tutorial significantly easier.

Animating Your Business Process Design

Process animation overcomes the presentation limitations encountered when studying process flows with static images. It analyzes process flows and converts the process design into an animation that can be viewed dynamically by the audience. Thus, process animation helps mitigate risks in business process improvement, increases the likelihood of optimizing processes on the first attempt, and leads to better decision-making in re-engineering and resource planning.

Next, we'll examine an example in Visual Paradigm.

Creating and Playing an Animation

The animation tool is diagram-based. You can set up multiple animations in a business process diagram to simulate various modeled scenarios. The first step is to add an animation. Afterward, adjust the flow by defining how the process navigates through the gateway. Then, you can play the animation.

In this section, we will begin with a simple process that involves no gateways. Once you understand how to operate process animation, we will explore other sample processes involving different types of gateways.

1. Download BPMN Case Studies.vpp. You can also find this file at the bottom of this tutorial.
2. Open the downloaded .vpp file in Visual Paradigm. To open a project, select Project > Open from the application toolbar.
3. Open the diagram Case 1 - Program Admission.
   
4. At the bottom of the diagram, the Animation Panel should be open. If it is not visible, open it manually by selecting Modeling > Animation from the application toolbar.
5. Click Add Animation (represented by a plus sign) at the top of the Animation Panel.
   
6. Give a meaningful name to the animation based on the flow you wish to animate. In this case, enter Form submission as the name and press Enter to confirm editing.
7. The path of the animation is determined automatically by evaluating the flow modeled in the diagram. Shapes that have been traversed are shown in the Animation Panel as icons. If you click on any of them, it will jump to the corresponding model element in the diagram.
   
8. Let's play the animation. Click the Play button.
   
9. Observe the diagram to see the animation. Shapes that have been traversed are highlighted in purple by default. Whenever the animation progresses through a sequence or message flow, a dark ball will appear and move along the line to guide your eye.
   
   The buttons in the Animation panel allow you to control the animation, such as pausing/stopping and moving it backward or forward step-by-step.

More about Gateways

A BPMN gateway is used to control process flow. It can have multiple incoming and outgoing flows. There are several types of gateways, each with distinct flow behaviors. When animating a process that involves a gateway, you must select the outgoing flows for that gateway (or gateways) to complete the path.

1. Open the diagram Case 2 - Order Processing and study the process.
   
2. Click Add Animation at the top of the Animation Panel.
3. Name the animation Order rejected.
4. When you press Enter, a portion of the path is determined, stopping at the Accept Order? Gateway. This occurs because you need to decide which outgoing flow to take. Since we want to animate the flow for order rejection, select No in the Animation Panel.
   
5. In the diagram, you will observe the created path and some greyed-out shapes (as they are not part of this specific path).
   
6. Play and see the animation.
7. Let's add another animation. Click Add Animation again. Name this animation Order accepted.
8. This time, choose Yes when you are at the Accept Order? gateway.
   
9. The flow is created and highlighted in the diagram.
   
   Note that a parallel gateway produces parallel flows between diverging and converging gateways.
   
10. Play and see the animation.
11. Let's also try with a process that involves an inclusive gateway. Open the diagram Case 3 - Bank and study the process.
    
12. Add an animation and name it Deposit and transfer.
13. An inclusive gateway can create both alternative and parallel paths. All combinations of outgoing paths may be traversed, which is why you are permitted to select multiple outgoing flows here. Select the flows for Process Deposit and Process Transferral.
    
14. Click the Confirm button to confirm your selection. The path is now completed.
    
15. Play and see the animation.

Exporting Animation to Web Content

If you need to present your business process where Visual Paradigm is not installed, you can do so in a web browser. In this section, we will export animations to web content for this purpose.

1. Right-click next to the animation's name and select Export... from the pop-up menu.
   
2. In the Export Animation window, enter a path for the HTML file and click OK. The exported page will automatically open in your default web browser.
   
3. Click the Play button at the bottom of the page. Observe the animation in your web browser.