On the Usefulness of Subprocesses in Business Process Models

To manage the size and complexity of business process models, the use of subprocesses is widely advocated. In this paper, we provide a review of work with respect to the modularization of business process models, which points at a lack of solid evidence for its benefits and the absence of clear criteria for identifying subprocesses. In response to this, we conducted an empirical investigation to test the effectiveness of using subprocesses in real-life process models. Our results suggest that modularization may foster the understanding of a complex business process model by its “information hiding” quality. Furthermore, we explored different categories of criteria that can be used to automatically derive process fragments that seem suitable to capture as subprocesses. From this exploration, approaches that consider the connectedness of subprocesses seem most attractive to pursue. This conclusion can be used to develop tool support for the modularization of business process models.