Business Process Management (BPM) research resulted in a plethora of methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. This survey aims to structure these results and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in BPM. In BPM the concept of a process model is fundamental. Process models may be used to configure information systems, but may also be used to analyze, understand, and improve the processes they describe. Hence, the introduction of BPM technology has both managerial and technical ramifications and may enable significant productivity improvements, cost savings, and flow-time reductions. The practical relevance of BPM and rapid developments over the last decade justify a comprehensive survey.

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Business Process Management: A Comprehensive Survey

Using real event data to X-ray business processes helps ensure conformance between design and reality.

Process mining

Given an event log describing observed behaviour, process discovery aims to find a process model that ‘best’ describes this behaviour. A large variety of process discovery algorithms has been proposed. However, no existing algorithm returns a sound model in all cases (free of deadlocks and other anomalies), handles infrequent behaviour well and finishes quickly. We present a technique able to cope with infrequent behaviour and large event logs, while ensuring soundness. The technique has been implemented in ProM and we compare the technique with existing approaches in terms of quality and performance.

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Discovering Block-Structured Process Models from Event Logs Containing Infrequent Behaviour

Traditionally, process-ware information systems (PAISs) have focused on the support of predictable and repetitive business processes. Even though respective processes are suited to be fully pre-specified in a process model, flexibility is required to support dynamic process adaptations in case of exceptions. Flexibility is also needed to accommodate the need for evolving business processes and to cope with business process variability. Furthermore, PAISs are increasingly used to support less structured processes which can often be characterized as knowledgeintensive. Processes of this category are neither fully predictable nor repetitive, and therefore cannot be fully pre-specified at build-time. The (partial) unpredictability of these processes also demands a certain amount of looseness. This chapter deals with the flexibility needs of both pre-specified and loosely-specified processes and elicitates requirements for flexible process support in a PAIS. In addition, the chapter discusses PAIS features needed to accommodate flexibility needs in practice like, for example, traceability, business compliance and user support.

Enabling Flexibility in Process-Aware Information Systems

Over the last decade, process mining emerged as a new research field that focuses on the analysis of processes using event data. Classical data mining techniques such as classification, clustering, regression, association rule learning, and sequence/episode mining do not focus on business process models and are often only used to analyze a specific step in the overall process. Process mining focuses on end-to-end processes and is possible because of the growing availability of event data and new process discovery and conformance checking techniques.Process models are used for analysis (e.g., simulation and verification) and enactment by BPM/WFM systems. Previously, process models were typically made by hand without using event data. However, activities executed by people, machines, and software leave trails in so-called event logs. Process mining techniques use such logs to discover, analyze, and improve business processes.Recently, the Task Force on Process Mining released the Process Mining Manifesto. This manifesto is supported by 53 organizations and 77 process mining experts contributed to it. The active involvement of end-users, tool vendors, consultants, analysts, and researchers illustrates the growing significance of process mining as a bridge between data mining and business process modeling. The practical relevance of process mining and the interesting scientific challenges make process mining one of the “hot” topics in Business Process Management (BPM). This article introduces process mining as a new research field and summarizes the guiding principles and challenges described in the manifesto.

Process Mining: Overview and Opportunities

Process mining techniques are able to extract knowledge from event logs commonly available in today’s information systems. These techniques provide new means to discover, monitor, and improve processes in a variety of application domains. There are two main drivers for the growing interest in process mining. On the one hand, more and more events are being recorded, thus, providing detailed information about the history of processes. On the other hand, there is a need to improve and support business processes in competitive and rapidly changing environments. This manifesto is created by the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining and aims to promote the topic of process mining. Moreover, by defining a set of guiding principles and listing important challenges, this manifesto hopes to serve as a guide for software developers, scientists, consultants, business managers, and end-users. The goal is to increase the maturity of process mining as a new tool to improve the (re)design, control, and support of operational business processes.

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Frank van Geffen

Papers

Process Mining Manifesto