Improving Business Processes using Process-oriented Data Warehouse

Sammanfattning: The Business Process Management (BPM) lifecycle consists of four phases: design and analysis, configuration, enactment, and evaluation - also known as performance analysis and improvement. Performance analysis and improvement of business processes, one of the core phases in the BPM life cycle, is becoming on top of the agenda for many enterprises. An emerging approach to that is to use the business intelligence approaches that attempt to facilitate the analytical capabilities of business process management systems by implementing process-oriented data warehouse and mining techniques. However, little work has been has done on developing core methods and tools for performance analysis and improvement of business processes. In particular, adequate methods, clearly defined steps or instructions that can guide process managers for analyzing and improving processes using process warehouse (PW) are not available. In the absence of such methods, guidelines or clearly defined steps, important steps may be ignored and credible improvements steps cannot be taken.This research addresses the described limitations by developing a method for performance analysis and improvement of business processes. The key feature of the developed method is, it employs business-orientation in the design and utilization of a PW. The method is composed of three steps, building goal-structure, integrating goal-structure with PW, and analyzing and improving business processes. During the first step, a set of top-level performance goals are identified for the process of interest. Subsequently, the identified  goals are decomposed to generate a goal-structure that is aligned with the functional decomposition of the process of interest. The second step describes a technique for integrating the generated goal-structure with PW. The third step describes, a performance estimation model, a decision model and a step by step approach that focuses on utilizing PW for analysis and improvement of business processes.In order to facilitate the use of the proposed method a prototype is developed. The prototype offers a graphical user interface for defining goal structure, integrating goals with PW, and goal-based navigation of PW. In order to evaluate the proposed method, we first develop an evaluation framework and subsequently use it for the evaluation of the proposed method. The framework consists of three components, each representing a type of evaluation. The components are, methodological-structure evaluation, performance-based evaluation and perception-based evaluation. The results of the evaluation show partial support for the methodological structure. However, the results of performance and perception evaluation show promising results of the proposed method.