unfortunately, at the moment that is the way the BPMN is generated - fresh on every save (this only applies if the BPMN saving is turned on - you can change this setting in Eclipse's preferences > Activiti > Save) If you want to maintain your additions, you will have to manually re-add them each time. It's probably best to maintain a copy of the file elsewhere and copy changes from it. Alternatively, you could apply an XSLT to the generated BPMN to automate this manual task. If you have very specific implementation details you wish to add, you could look at writing your own ExportMarshaller; this gives you full control over the generated output. The documentation for ExportMarshallers can be found here: http://activiti.org/userguide/index.html#N11639