Why do process variants matter for process monitoring?

Business processes models typically serve as a specification for a future system or as a documentation of an already existing one; it can also serve both purposes. As precise documentation of an implemented business process, process models provide an input to configure a process monitoring system, enabling the specification of monitoring points and metrics. However, complex business processes show an unexpected quantity of potential variants, which impede the activation of process monitoring. In this paper, we elaborate on the impact of variants on the configuration of a process monitoring system, and show how the number of model variants can be significantly reduced by analyzing the syntactic and semantic information related with decisions in a business process. Applied to an existing business process, we identified almost 60,000 variants, which we were able to reduce by over 65%. At the same time, we improved the quality of the process model.