Compliance of business processes has gained importance during the last years. The growing number of internal and external regulations that companies need to obey has led to this state. This paper presents a practical concept of ensuring compliance during design time of customizable business processes.

We introduce the concept of a business process template that implicitly contains compliance constraints as well as points of variability. We further present an algorithm that ensures that these constraints cannot be violated. We also show how these algorithms can be used to check whether a customization of this process template is valid regarding these compliance constraints. So the designer of a business process, in contrast to the template designer, does not have to worry about compliance of the eventual process.

In a final step we show how these general concepts can be applied to WS-BPEL.