"The ideal process is a fully-automated one that removes human involvement. This is a process without any user tasks and it’s referred to as Straight Through Processing (STP). By capturing a process in a static diagram and removing all human interaction you ensure that each instance completes in a consistent manner. Any ad-hoc activities that are part of human nature, like taking a coffee break or visiting with a colleague, are no longer occurring when it’s captured as an STP process. Figure 1.3 is an example of an STP process, where the tasks and decisions are made without human involvement from start to finish. This process always reaches one of the end nodes in the process diagram for each and every instance of the process. Sometimes a piece of business value which needs to be captured as a process can’t be fully automated. There remains human involvement to complete these types of processes, yet automating tasks improves the business enough to justify turning it into a process. By capturing a process that contains user tasks, you’ve stumbled upon an important feature of BPM which allows you to manage wait states. A wait state’s any task that requires that you pause processing and wait for some external event to notify the process to move onwards."