The purpose of developing a specific process model for document intensive business processes is, firstly to understand the role of document management in a typical information intensive workflow environment, secondly, to provide a basis for evaluating the impact of different document management options on the total performance of a business process, and thirdly, to provide a basis for evaluating different document flow control patterns in a business process. The Model DFM not only provides constructs to model tasks in a business process, but also provides constructs to model document manipulation and circulation. Object modeling identifies different objects in the system and their relationships. A DFM object can be either a document object , a signal object or a product object. A document object can be either electronic or paper .
Electronic documents can be image , plain text or formatted documents , such as SGML and forms .
Relationships between documents are related to how documents are processed. The process model combines features of the Petri net and Queuing approaches. It specifies tasks and file stores . Objects and file stores may serve as inputs to and output from tasks. Tasks correspond to transitions in Petri net terminology.