The article discusses the solution of common business process design-time problems using YAWL. The approach proposed by the authors is based on the creation of business process in the YAWL environment in order to simulate the process model which could resolve some of the design-time problems as well as provide hints to correct initial process. Simulation is based on transformation to colored Petri net – the net is then simulated to identify problems such as possible infinite loops, bottlenecks, process waits and others. The article also describes technique to acquire the primitive description of process from the YAWL workflow. The primitive description is represented as oriented graph and is used to transform the YAWL workflow to another hierarchic language, in this case BPEL.