Nerhesi:

The fact that BPMN and Activity Diagrams are poor choices for documenting flow of resources or data becuase of all the resulting complexity is  a significant real world problem that one will not find in any book.  A common complant of mine is that people who popularize methodologies and write books typically seem to have no hands-on experience with complex systems.

But, again, data flow diagrams are not just for documenting the flow of data.   This is a vey common misunderstanding.  The flows can be of ANY process input or output including physical part or materials.

What data flow diagrams offer is the opportunity to document flow of resources/data/etc at the higher levels - and flow of control/sequence at the lowest levels.   Doing such makes sense in that at the higher level, manual/automated systems, especially larger scale ones, have no sequence.  And by postponing flow of control/sequence to the lowest level, we do not result in creating diagrams that are so complex that it is impossible to fiigure out where our errors are at.

Tony

Business Process Modeling Improves Administrative Control. His idea was that techniques for obtaining a better appreciative of physical control systems could be used in a parallel way for business processes.

Brilliant stuff, man! What you have to say is really important and I am glad you took the time to share it. A business process will typically produce one or more outputs of value to the business, either for internal use of to satisfy external requirements. An output may be a physical object such as a report or invoice, a transformation of unprocessed resources into a new arrangement (a daily schedule or roster) or an overall business result such as completing a customer order.