Analysis and improvement of business process models using spreadsheets

Abstract

a b s t r a c tSoftware in general is thoroughly analyzed before it is released to its users. Business processes often are not -at least not as thoroughly as it could be -before they are released to their users, e.g., employees or software agents. This paper ascribes this practice to the lack of suitable instruments for business process analysts, who design the processes, and aims to provide them with the necessary instruments to allow them to also analyze their processes. We use the spreadsheet paradigm to represent business process analysis tasks, such as writing metrics and assertions, running performance analysis and verification tasks, and reporting on the outcomes, and implement a spreadsheet-based tool for business process analysis. The results of two independent user studies demonstrate the viability of the approach.

Comparing and Aligning Process Representations

“…Within the context of Process Performance Measurement, great effort has been put on the formalization of PPI definitions. This has resulted in a number of notations and frameworks for the description and monitoring of PPIs [67,112,147,198,208,218,235,243,286]. The main differences among them are found in their expressiveness, i.e.…”

Visual ppinot: A Graphical Notation for Process Performance Indicators

“…Many of them propose languages and architectures for describing and monitoring PPIs, some from a general point of view such as Castellanos et al (2005), Popova and Sharpanskykh (2010) or Saldivar et al (2016), whereas others are specific to certain contexts such as semantic business processes (Pedrinaci et al 2008;Wetzstein et al 2008) or service-oriented architectures (Momm et al 2007).…”

“…The evaluation of the tool support for PPI definition in current BPMSs is based on the analysis performed and presented in Saldivar et al (2016) Because not all the tools could be installed for their study, we have also based our analysis on the official documentation published by each solution. Sometimes, the documentation provided insufficient information to draw a conclusion about a particular feature.…”

“…Finally, from an academic perspective, a number of research proposals for the definition of PPIs have been presented (Castellanos et al 2005;Popova and Sharpanskykh 2010;Saldivar et al 2016;Pedrinaci et al 2008;Wetzstein et al 2008;Momm et al 2007;Costello and Molloy 2009;González et al 2009;Friedenstab et al 2012;Delgado et al 2014), but all of them fall short both of expressiveness to define most PPIs that can be found in real scenarios, and of visually representing the links between PPIs and business process models (see Sect. 9.1 for more details).…”

Gap analysis business process model by using structural similarity

“…The event log will be used by several process model building algorithms to generate business process models directly [5,6]. Process modeling algorithm will run optimally if the event log that is processed is an event log that has complete information [7]. In the process modeling algorithm, there are two things that are of concern, namely non-free choice and invisible tasks.…”