Swimlanes

Swimlanes identify who is doing what within the organization. They may identify an individual, or a role. A business process diagram can be used to show a B2B environment where multiple participants collaborate. BPMN uses Swimlanes to help partition and/organize activities.

Since business processes are typically horizontal, not vertical—that is, they involve multiple departments, not just one—swimlanes provide the business analyst with a mechanism to illustrate the departmental or company boundaries that are crossed during a particular business process.

A BPMN diagram may depict more than one private process, as well as the processes that show the collaboration between private processes or participants. Graphically, each participant will be partitioned; that is, will be contained within a rectangular box called a Pool. Pools can have one or more Swimlanes, which can be further divided in Lanes.