Your observations are correct, this is the classical concurrency issue and it is not an easy issue to solve. What you can at least do is declare each variable as a local one. Then they will be stored purely related to the token *first*... in a second step you can update the variable on a higher level after checking differences and you can always find all data back. (you also could do this via the logging mechanism since each update is logged) Hibernate locking will not solve this, maybe hibernate versioning can in some way (but you'd have to know the initial version somewhere). Normally we store as many data as possible in our own domain model and use processvariables for kind of fixed data like the businesskey. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4162115#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...