What Is the UPN Standards Review?
The UPN (Universal Process Notation) Standards Review is a smart assistant that helps improve the quality and structure of your process diagrams. It uses AI to check if your diagrams follow UPN best practices—making them clearer, more consistent, and better suited for automation and advanced analysis.
This tool is especially helpful if you're:
New to UPN and want to learn how to do it right.
Importing diagrams from another system.
Permissions
To use this feature:
You must be a Diagram Editor
Your user or space must have ElementsGPT license enabled
The diagram must be in draft mode
UPN Standards Review is only available in business process diagrams.
What the Review Checks
Business process diagramming in Elements application is done exclusively using Universal Process Notation. We believe that UPN is the best diagramming notation for user journey and business processes discovery.
You can read more about the notation here.
When you run a UPN Standards Review, it looks at three key areas:
Activity boxes:
Are they connected with both input and output flowlines?
Is the text inside the activity clear, verb-based, and grammatically correct?
Flowlines:
Are they attached to at least one activity?
Do their labels describe distinct, unique, verifiable outcomes?
Resources:
Does every activity have at least one responsible person, system, or role?
If something is missing or unclear, you'll get specific suggestions on how to improve it.
How to Start a Review of Your Process Diagram
Open your business process diagram. Make sure you are in the draft version and you have entered the 'edit' mode on the diagram.
In the right panel, open the 'Insights' tab, then in the 'Standards' sub-tab click on the text button 'Review diagram'.
You will see a notification and progress of recommendations being generated for your business process diagram.
Reviewing the Recommendations
Once the review finishes, recommendations appear in a new tab on the right. Each suggestion will highlight:
The part of the diagram it relates to.
The proposed improvement.
An explanation of why the change is useful.
Actioning Recommendations
Accept all recommendations.
Reject all.
Accept or reject individually.
Changes you accept are applied instantly. If you change your mind, you can undo the change using the standard undo button in the Diagram interface.
What Happens Next?
Accepted suggestions improve your diagram immediately.
Rejected or outdated suggestions disappear from the list.
You can run another review later to catch any newly added or edited content.
If no suggestions are found, you’ll see a confirmation that your diagram meets UPN standards—great job!
Before/After Example
Here is a basic, flowchart-esque diagram drawn before recommendations were applied. Notice lack of detail, lack of verifiable outcomes, no specificity on who is responsible for conducting the activity.
After recommendations are applied, the diagram contains more detail and specifies the desired outcomes, who is responsible, and updates the activity text to be active verbs.
Tip: While good, we still advise you to review and confirm if the resources added to the activities are right ones, and if the outcomes suggested by AI are as you intend.