Analysis of Business Processes with Enterprise Ontology and Process Mining

This paper describes a business process analysis method that helps determining if a business process complies with the requirements put forward by enterprise ontology's transaction pattern. The method starts by discovering the business process through the application of process mining techniques to the events that are generated by the applications that support the execution of the process. This step discovers the actual implementation of the process from its event trace. Next, the discovered process is analysed against enterprise ontology's transaction pattern to determine whether the process complies with the structure and sequencing of its coordination and production acts. The paper shows that combining process mining with enterprise ontology contributes to the analysis of business processes, especially in terms of determining the boundaries of authority and responsibility of the process. The feasibility and the limitations of the method are discussed using a case study that analyses a semi-automated business process.