# Spreadsheets as Interoperability Solution for Business Process Representation
## 1 Introduction  
Process models are commonly used by organizations to depict the workflow of the company, especially to specify alternative flows of tasks and events. Such aspects are often specified using textual description in internal regulations, resolutions or other companies law acts. Such descriptions consist of the specification of steps taken to achieve the specific goal. These steps can be easily specified using a spreadsheet or an enumerated list (an ordered list of steps can be almost directly transformed into a spreadsheet format). Business process management can be considered as a part of knowledge management [1]. In process management, identification of business processes is a time consuming task. According to the studies [2], up to 60% of the time spent on process management projects can be consumed by the acquisition of process models, which mostly is done manually by process designers or business analytics. In some cases, where there is a process description or some specification available, it can be easier to model such a process. Thus, generating or transforming the existing representation to models can shorten this time.  
A process model may be obtained from natural language description [2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 7]. In some cases, a structured textual description, such as Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR), can be used to obtain the process model [8; 9]. However, in comparison with natural language description, over 60% of experienced BPMN modelers find creating process models easier if a specification is facilitated with rule-mapped text [10]. Thus, preprocessing is a key issue in using the existing specification. The representation in natural language (based on some documents such as standards, ISO documents, user instructions or manuals) after processing can include inconsistencies.  
Especially, some documents may provide incomplete or contradictory pieces of information that may lead to the incapability of generating a correct model. Although there are some solutions for this, e.g., summarization of processes [11], using e.g., semantic unification [12].  
In this paper, we present a method of generating graphical process models from spreadsheet-based representation. It extends our previous research discussed during the knowledge acquisition workshop [13]. The original contribution is the specification of creating the spreadsheet with ordered list and its transformation into a process model. Moreover, we provide the mapping between the spreadsheet-based representation and various business process representations. Such a spreadsheet can be created either manually or merged from the task list specifications provided by users. It also can be generated from semi-formal or informal documents [14]. Our spreadsheet-based process representation supports all basic BPMN elements which covers the most commonly used elements of BPMN diagram [15].  
The remaining part of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the current research directions in terms of generating process models from various knowledge representations, focusing on the approaches to business process modeling using spreadsheets. In Section 3, we give a detailed specification of our spreadsheet representation for a business process model. The overview of the proposed approach is presented in Section 4. Section 5 presents a mapping between spreadsheet process representations and corresponding process model structures in other notations, focusing mostly on BPMN. Moreover, it presents the details of the procedure of generating BPMN process models based on a spreadsheet. Section 6 provides the evaluation of our approach. It compares it with other interchange solutions as well as shows a case study example. The summary of the paper is given in Section 7.