Business Process Analytics

Abstract

Business Process Management systems (BPMS) are a rich source of events that document the execution of processes and activities within these systems. Business Process Management analytics is the family of methods and tools that can be applied to these event streams in order to support decision making in organizations. The analysis of process events can focus on the behavior of completed processes, evaluate currently running process instances, or focus on predicting the behavior of process instances in the future. This chapter provides an overview of the different methods and technologies that can be employed in each of these three areas of process analytics. We discuss the underlying format and types of process events as the common source of analytics information, present techniques for the aggregation and composition of these events, and outline methods that support backward-and forward-looking process analytics.

Using a Business Activity Monitoring and SOA for a Real-Time ETL

“…presently, BAM is normally integrated as a feature of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems or workflow management systems. One of the fundamental objectives of BAM is to to minimize the latency [5] of decision making by offering support for immediate operational decisions and for taking suitable actions based on real-time information [6]. BAM is frequently used to capture data from applications built using serviceoriented architecture principles.…”

Beyond process monitoring: a proof‐of‐concept of event‐driven business activity management

“…Some BAM tools contain complex event processing functionality, namely "filtering, transformation, and most importantly aggregation of events" (Etzion and Niblett, 2010, p. 18). In addition, by applying rules engines BAM systems can generate alerts and initiate actions which inform managers of critical situations (zur Muehlen & Shapiro, 2010). "This can be done in batch mode [ .…”

“…The aim of these approaches is to provide process owners and participants with evidence-based insights about the performance of operational business processes (Davenport & Harris, 2007;zur Muehlen & Shapiro, 2010). Business Process Management System (BPMS) constitute a primary data source for these approaches.…”

“…Moreover, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) or Process Mining tools (van der Aalst, 2011;Weske, van der Aalst, & Verbeek, 2004;zur Muehlen & Shapiro, 2010) are limited to rather passive monitoring and reporting and are not able to actually take action on a running business process. It would require hardwiring systems of these two kinds to achieve end-to-end insight to action feedback loops.…”

Special section on business process analytics

“…Business process analytics refers to the family of processcentric methods and tools that integrate process modeling, process data management, and process mining and data analysis with data-driven decision making that aims at process enhancement (zur Muehlen and Shapiro 2015). Business process analytics provides a conceptual and computational framework to guide organizations in systematic, focused efforts to increase the efficiency of business process design and the effectiveness of business process management.…”