> [!tldr] There's no "Official" tool, but there are many capable ones
There's no "Official" tool for making IDEF0 diagrams. Perhaps because they are so rudimentary that such a tool couldn't possibly have a giant competitive advantage over one-another, but perhaps more likely just that there isn't really a huge demand, despite the fact that [[IDEF0]] is "the most useful tool" to communicate business change, according to the author of Business Process Re-engineering using IDEF0. While there are multitude of tools and platforms trying to be "the platform" for [[SysML]], [[UML]], and even [[Archimate]], the best tools for [[IDEF]] are general-purpose in nature.
This means there's no guarantee of [[Referential Integrity]] enforced by the tooling. This is something that, frankly, I **could** build myself _someday_™️.
# Tools
- **Pen & Paper**- it's what the language was designed with, and it works well!
- **[[Excalidraw]]** - my favorite white boarding app is great, perhaps the best, for making single diagrams. It's not great for multi-page "drillable" diagrams, though.
- **Outlining** - it's *not* ideal, but you could [[Data Serialization|serialize]] an [[IDEF0]] model fairly easily. The only real quibble would be with somewhat loosey-goosey semantics for an arrow splitting into two more specific arrows.
- A0 - Making a Sandwich
- C - Recipe
- O - Sandwich
- O - Clean area
- A1 - Getting Ingredients
- C - Recipe
- O - Ingredients
- A2 - Assembling sandwich
- I - Ingredients
- C - Recipe
- O - Made sandwich
- M - Sliverware
- A3 - Cleaning
- I - Dirty silverware
- C - Cleaning standards
- O - Clean area
- M - Sink
- **[[DrawIO]]** - is good for multi-page diagramming and looks to have everything else! It's probably the right choice.
- DrawIO Example 👇
![[IDEF test-Page-1.drawio.svg]]
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## Source
## Related
- [[IDEF0]]