Supporting the Full BPM Life-Cycle Using Process Mining and Intelligent Redesign

Business Process Management (BPM) systems provide a broad range of facilities to enact and manage operational business processes. Ideally, these systems should provide support for the complete BPM life-cycle: (re)design, configuration, execution, control, and diagnosis of processes. However, based on an extensive evaluation of the FileNet P8 BPM Suite, we show that existing BPM tools are unable to support the full life-cycle. There are clearly gaps between the various phases (i.e., users need to transfer or interpret information without any support) and some of the phases (e.g., the redesign and diagnosis phases) are not supported satisfactorily. We selected the FileNet P8 BPM Suite because it is consistently ranked as one of the leading commercial BPM systems and representative for the current generation of BPM products. Based on this evaluation, we show what is needed to close the BPM life-cycle and seamlessly support all phases. We will argue that techniques for process mining and intelligent redesign are needed to support the (re)design and diagnosis phases and thus close the BPM life-cycle. We also briefly report on the work done in the context of the ProM tool which is used as framework to experiment with such techniques.