Thanks for the quick reply Ronald. I was aware of the term milestone being used in a workflow pattern for synchronizing parallel branches... although I assume this was not fully baked yet as the "milestone-node" doesn't appear the jPDL schema. Looks like there is a test case that exercises it, though. Anyway... I was having trouble understanding you last sentence or two. Are you saying that what I'm proposing is not inherently bad when using reporting tool like SeeWhy? And what did you mean by anonymous wrote : not use specific queries to retrieve start and end date of normal tasks/nodes/joins/... whatever FYI... the reason we are doing this is that processes can involve tens or sometimes 100+ steps and process designers want to place milestones to logically mark of points that are of importance to them. Their goal is to set up processes so that any could be viewed from a macro perspective by looking at the progress of the milestone nodes. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4158489#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...