IBM BPM 7.5 White Paper

To support your view that BPMN can support cases but likely needs to be extended to do a good job of, one can look at insurance companies: they routinely use case management to handle claims (and often also policies), and their systems are designed for their staff (and/or intermediaries) to manage cases and eventually close them. But, if need be, a case can be reopened, something that (exectuable) BPMN will severely struggle with. The reason that insurance companies can’t automate case management is in deed due to the inherent degree of uncertainty about what will happen next in a case – e.g. a passenger in a car crash unpredictably and after some time becomes a new claimant due to a late-appearing injury. Nevertheless, the overall case handling ‘process’ is always the same, albeit only the same at a very coarse level, too coarse for automation to make business sense, and so insurance companies struggle to automate their case handling. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t want to: simple cases are highly predictable and thus can be automated, for example claims for chipped car windscreens. Insurance companies still open a case for these, but no human interacts with the claim, unless an exception occurs. The trend in insurance companies is to increase the degree of automated case handling by looking for further types of claims for which repeatable process flows are defined, where unexpected event occur rarely, and which are then handled in a fully automated way. So, this trend in insurance companies certainly supports your view about where BPMN is headed with respect to case management.

Yes, no problem, move it to case management thread.