Business Process Diagrams

BPMN Order Processbusinesspools, lanes, events, gateways and message flows for an online shop order, plus a payment timeout. Swimlane Flowchart: Expense Approvalbusinessa cross-functional flowchart of employee, manager and finance, with a vertical-lane hiring variant. Business Use Case Diagrambusinessan insurance company's stakeholders, services and the business goals behind them. Customer Journey Mapbusinessstages, touchpoints, emotions and pain points of switching broadband, with a service blueprint.

Business process diagrams describe how an organisation delivers value: who its customers and partners are, which services it offers them, which teams do the work, and the exact order of steps, decisions and waits. Analysts, product managers, operations leads and auditors use them to agree on how things work today and to design how they should work tomorrow.

Most of these diagrams are not UML. UML covers software structure and behaviour; BPMN, swimlane flowcharts and journey maps are the other standard notations used alongside it. The exception is the business use case diagram, which reuses UML use case shapes at the level of the whole company.

Choosing a Diagram

From Customer View to Executable Process Who sees what? Customer journey map Who is served? Business use cases Who does what? Swimlane flowchart Exactly how? BPMN process outside-in view → ownership → precise, executable process

Start outside-in. A journey map shows the experience as the customer lives it. A business use case diagram lists the services the company provides and the stakeholders it serves. A swimlane flowchart then shows which team performs each step, and BPMN pins the process down precisely enough to automate in a workflow engine. You rarely need all four; pick the one that answers the question in front of you.

QuestionDiagramSample page
What does the customer go through, and where does it hurt?Customer journey mapSwitching home broadband
Which services does the business offer, and to whom?Business use case diagramInsurance company
Which team does each step, and where are the hand-offs?Swimlane flowchartExpense approval
What exactly happens, including timeouts, messages and parallel work?BPMN 2.0 processOnline shop order

Every sample page follows the same layout: one large diagram with a numbered walkthrough, a notation legend, a variant such as an error path or alternative view, pros and cons, and the diagram as text in Mermaid or PlantUML so it can live in version control next to the code.

A practical tip: keep the same names across all four. If the journey map calls a stage "Sign up", the BPMN task should not call it "Customer acquisition". Shared vocabulary is what lets a pain point on the journey map be traced to the exact lane and task that causes it.

BPMNdiagramsnotation reference Flowchartsdiagramsclassic flowchart shapes UML Use Case Diagramsumlthe system-level counterpart DiagrammingSectionall diagram types on this site