Challenges in Business Process Analysis

Business process analysis ranges from model verification at design-time to the monitoring of processes at run-time. Much progress has been achieved in process verification. Today we are able to verify the entire reference model of SAP without any problems. Moreover, more and more processes leave their “trail” in the form of event logs. This makes it interesting to apply process mining to these logs. Interestingly, practical applications of process mining reveal that reality is often quite different from the idealized models, also referred to as “PowerPoint reality”. Future process-aware information systems will need to provide full support of the entire life-cycle of business processes. Recent results in business process analysis show that this is indeed possible, e.g., the possibilities offered by process mining tools such as ProM are breathtaking both from a scientific and practical perspective.