Interdisciplinary Assessment of Process Modeling Languages Applicable for Small to Medium-sized Enterprises

In the context of global competition, effective and sustainable business process management is about capturing, analyzing, and redesigning business processes, as well as in SME. Process models support this procedure by creating a common understanding of the process organization and providing an indication of how to develop optimizing strategies. The implementation of a business process modeling language is a fundamental requirement for all process management efforts, but the selection is hindered by an unmanageable number of Business Process Modeling Languages from various disciplines. Since resources availability is a primary concern in SME, there is a need for a resource-saving establishment and maintenance of business process management, based on an expressive business process modeling language and taking SME-specific requirements into account. To this purpose, common business process modeling languages are analyzed respective their applicability in SME. An interdisciplinary evaluation framework evolved from this approach, primarily focusing on the expressiveness and comprehensiveness of the graphical notation. This approach successfully combines engineering knowledge about process modeling in general, enriched with a psychological view on the effects of visual-graphical characteristics of graphical notations. The interdisciplinary evaluation framework aims at providing decision guidance for SME in the phase of choosing a business process modeling language.