Compliance of business processes is becoming increasingly important in the domain of business process design. Despite that, human process designers must be able to concentrate on the business goals which a business process needs to fulfil. Compliance aspects of the business process should not be in the main focus of the human process designer during the development phase. Therefore, tools must support human process designers in developing compliant business processes. In this paper we introduce the concept of compliance scopes. Compliance scopes are areas in a business process where certain compliance conditions must hold. These conditions are attached to the compliance scopes.

Compliance scopes can be applied to existing business process models as well as to process templates. In this way compliance rules are applied to certain areas of a business process. During design time, compliance scopes can be used in graphical workbenches to evaluate modifications to business processes.