Level 1 simply tries to capture the current-state processes for documentation, analysis, and eventual improvement. It uses the part of BPMN that is familiar from traditional flowcharting – swimlanes, boxes, and arrows – easily understood by the newly formed BPM project teams. Level 2 BPMN models created by process architects, business architects, and top-tier business analysts form the base activity flow layer on top of which IT layers the data model, business rules, and other implementation properties.

The term BPM-folks refers to the people that focus on process modelling. Their starting point is the analysis of procedures that describe how people and systems work together in an organisation. For many of BPM projects in that category, automation of the processes is not even considered. The final goal is actually to create more insight in how an organisation works by documenting the core business processes. The pure play BPM products that come from this background aim to ease the automation of software support for such business process descriptions.