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Recently, research on workflow activity patterns emerged in order to increase the reuse of recurring business functions (eg, request for task execution, notification, approval and decision). While workflow patterns have been defined for several aspects related to process execution, recurrent business functions have been only partially addressed by existing work. Related to this challenge we proposed a set of seven workflow activity patterns in previous work. In this paper we report on the results of several case studies we performed in Brazilian and European companies in order to investigate how frequently the activity patterns occur in real-world process models. We further formalize the identified activity patterns using π-calculus. This formalization as well as our analysis results are applied in the development of a BPM tool fostering the reuse of business functions specifications.