The interactions and transactions between companies and their partners, suppliers, and customers are becoming ever more complex, mostly due to new information and communication technologies. It is becoming more and more evident that the further development and performance of business processes depend on close cooperation between the various business associates.

On the one hand, it is important for a company to be able to better understand its own actions and those of its business associates; on the other hand, organizations should be given the ability to adapt faster to internal and market-driven changes. A standardized process modeling language can help companies to describe their internal and external business processes clearly and flexibly. Companies must also be in a position to communicate the modeled processes to their business associates appropriately, clearly, and comprehensibly. All parties involved should speak the same 'process language'.

To reach these goals, the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org) offers a standardized modeling language: "Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN)". BPMN is a graphical notation for describing business processes.

The notation is required to be easily understood by all users. This makes it suitable not only for business process analysts and those who monitor and manage processes, but also for developers who implement the process execution technologies.

Furthermore, it is important to ensure that XML-based languages can be visualized with this notation for business process automation, e.g., Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS).