Because the designed workflow may contain potential errors which may result in deadlocks, livelocks and so on, it is important to analyze the correctness of a workflow definition before it is put into the run time environment. Proposed in this paper is a transformation procedure of an UML activity diagram into a Petri net for the analysis of a workflow. By combining the strengths of easy-to-use functionality of an activity diagram and the analysis power of a Petri net, workflow analysts in the enterprise can model and analyze various kinds of workflow definition more easily and accurately.