Abstract. Business process management and improvement are vital for enterprises in competitive environments. Understanding of a process is a pre-requisite and important step for improvement. Interaction between humans, computers, and business objects provide excellent opportunities for knowledge extraction. However, the specification of a framework is required for business process improvement, which extends from data collection, analytical methods, storage, and representation of knowledge. The process models conceived for information system development are not sufficient for post execution analysis and improvement. In this paper, we specify such a framework briefly and focus on providing representational support for business process improvement. The main objective is to improve the overall improvement process by providing enriched graphical process models. Furthermore, we use a case study to explain the proposed usage and extensions of an existing modeling language for business process improvement.

-Business process modeling is used for better understanding and communication of company's processes. Mostly, business process modeling is discussed from the information system development perspective. Execution of a business process involves various factors (costs and time) which are important and should be represented in business process models. Controlling of business units uses post execution analysis for detection of failures for improvement. The process models conceived for information system development are not sufficient for post execution analysis. This paper focuses on the challenges of business process modeling in the post execution context. We provide a meta model for evaluation of a business process and discuss BPMN in this context. We also extend existing BPMN meta model for performance analysis of business processes. The proposed extensions are presented with the help of an example.

Process mining is an emerging analysis technique, which extracts process knowledge from data and provides various benefits to organizations. In Service Oriented Computing environment, different services collaborate with others to carry out the operations and therefore overall picture of operations and execution is not clear. Process mining extracts the information from log files of systems, as recorded during executions, and depicts the reality. In order to apply process mining, extraction of process trace data from log files is a prerequisite step. A case study demonstrates the practical applicability of our proposed framework for extraction of the process trace data from application systems and integration portals.

Evaluation of business processes is important for analysis and improvement of an organization. Different methods are used to evaluate the performance like statistics or visualization. However, these methods meet demands mainly on the top organizational level. There is insufficient support to evaluate processes at the process managerial level leading to a limited visibility of deficiencies in business processes at process level. In this paper, we address this challenge and focus on the relation between evaluation of business processes and their representation at the process managerial level. In our research, we follow the design science methodology in order to provide business process models for performance analysis. We also provide constructs and patterns of our proposed modeling language for analysis and improvement of business processes. The analytical business process modeling language is further explained with the help of a case study and demonstrated by extending an existing modeling language.

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