Business Process Management (BPM) includes methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. It can be considered as an extension of classical Workflow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. Although the practical relevance of BPM is undisputed, a clear definition of BPM and related acronyms such as BAM, BPA, and STP are missing. Moreover, a clear scientific foundation is missing. In this paper, we try to demystify the acronyms in this domain, describe the state-of-the-art technology, and argue that BPM could benefit from formal methods/languages (cf. Petri nets, process algebras, etc.).

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Business process management: a survey

Conformance checking of processes based on monitoring real behavior

Under the umbrella of buzzwords such as “Business Activity Monitoring” (BAM) and “Business Process Intelligence” (BPI) both academic (e.g., EMiT, Little Thumb, InWoLvE, Process Miner, and MinSoN) and commercial tools (e.g., ARIS PPM, HP BPI, and ILOG JViews) have been developed. The goal of these tools is to extract knowledge from event logs (e.g., transaction logs in an ERP system or audit trails in a WFM system), i.e., to do process mining. Unfortunately, tools use different formats for reading/storing log files and present their results in different ways. This makes it difficult to use different tools on the same data set and to compare the mining results. Furthermore, some of these tools implement concepts that can be very useful in the other tools but it is often difficult to combine tools. As a result, researchers working on new process mining techniques are forced to build a mining infrastructure from scratch or test their techniques in an isolated way, disconnected from any practical applications. To overcome these kind of problems, we have developed the ProM framework, i.e., an “pluggable” environment for process mining. The framework is flexible with respect to the input and output format, and is also open enough to allow for the easy reuse of code during the implementation of new process mining ideas. This paper introduces the ProM framework and gives an overview of the plug-ins that have been developed.

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The prom framework: a new era in process mining tool support

https://www.win.tue.nl/~hreijers/H.A.%20Reijers%20Bestanden/mining.pdf

Business process mining: An industrial application

Process Mining is a technique for extracting process models from executionlogs. This is particularly useful in situations where people have an idealizedview of reality. Real-life processes turn out to be less structured than peopletend to believe. Unfortunately, traditional process mining approaches haveproblems dealing with unstructured processes. The discovered models are often"spaghetti-like", showing all details without distinguishing what is important andwhat is not. This paper proposes a new process mining approach to overcome thisproblem. The approach is configurable and allows for different faithfully simplifiedviews of a particular process. To do this, the concept of a roadmap is used asa metaphor. Just like different roadmaps provide suitable abstractions of reality,process models should provide meaningful abstractions of operational processesencountered in domains ranging from healthcare and logistics to web servicesand public administration.

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Fuzzy mining: adaptive process simplification based on multi-perspective metrics

Many of today's information systems are driven by explicit process models. Workflow management systems, but also ERP, CRM, SCM, and B2B, are configured on the basis of a workflow model specifying the order in which tasks need to be executed. Creating a workflow design is a complicated time-consuming process and typically there are discrepancies between the actual workflow processes and the processes as perceived by the management. To support the design of workflows, we propose the use of workflow mining. Starting point for workflow mining is a so-called "workflow log" containing information about the workflow process as it is actually being executed. In this paper, we introduce the concept of workflow mining and present a common format for workflow logs. Then we discuss the most challenging problems and present some of the workflow mining approaches available today.

/pdf/workflow-mining-a-survey-of-issues-and-approaches-3w9qivv4j2.pdf

G. Schimm

Papers

Workflow mining: a survey of issues and approaches