Successful companies tend to document the workflow and description of each crucial process to have a clear understanding of how the company runs in different departments. Analysis and business process improvement is a part of business process management. But before analyzing and improving them, the first step is the discovery. To do this, it is important to model a process using standard notation. Here we’ll talk about two notations – Business Process Notation (BPMN) 2.0. and Universal Process Notation (UPN).

Business Process Notation (BPMN 2.0) is a widely used process notation among managers, however, it requires time and effort to understand its syntax and logic. There are a couple of main objects within BPMN 2.0:

• Flow (event, activities, gateway),
• Connections (sequence, flow, association),
• Swimlanes (pool, lane), and
• Artifacts (data object, group, annotation).

To model with such a variety of different objects, there are common modeling rules to take into consideration. While this generally makes a process detailed but still visually organized, it also requires knowledge of understanding different gateway types, flow purposes, and activity features.

The image below shows the BPMN 2.0 complexity: given all object types in the notation, there are many different ways to model a process. Such notation requires extensive understanding of each symbol in order to understand how a process works.

While some would agree that the standard notation for model processes is BPMN 2.0, there is no specific notation that is officially recognized as a standard for notating models. The reason for that is that users/stakeholders with different competencies interpret these models – ranging from experienced process managers that use process notations regularly – to users that do not have experience with modeling or interpreting process notations. Such users would rather prefer, for example, flowcharts, but, those diagrams do not present all the needed information.

From our experience, many users need to analyze processes based on BPMN 2.0, but they do not have the knowledge or experience with it. Because of this, a new notation emerged, called Universal Process Notation (UPN).

Universal Process Notation (UPN) – easy to understand approach to process modelling

Universal Process Notation (UPN) helps in modeling (notating) a process in a standardized way (in a way that the general population would understand the purpose). As the name suggests, the purpose was to create a universal notation for processes that allows easier understanding, while still comprehending the most important features that any process notation should contain. Recently we talked with one of UPN’s creators, Walter Bril on the benefits of UPN:

“UPN, as a process notation, goes far beyond ‘just creating process-images’ and supports a very wide business audience to safe-guard both process understanding and engagement with that audience. Its structure is hierarchical and provides context for digesting and/or analyzing information on the level of your business needs.”

Walter Bril

How does UPN simplify BPMN?

The idea behind UPN is to keep all process information visible while maintaining the visual aspect of process modeling easy to understand. In general, UPN simplifies modeling by using the activity blocks of processes, which are:

• who,
• what,
• when,
• why, and
• how

Differences between BPMN and UPN

One of the main differences between BPMN and UPN is how gateways (decision points) are represented. Instead of having different gateway symbols for specific decision categories, you can just have multiple arrows coming in and going out of an event. Another feature that gives an easier understanding of a process is advanced activity boxes that represent three categories:

• WHAT happens,
• WHO is responsible, and
• WHAT systems are used

This replaces pools and lanes that are part of BPMN but also adds systems included in an event. Such a solution turned out to be efficient for a universal understanding of a process model. Lastly, arrows compared to BPMN are having written descriptions of WHEN an event is happening, and WHY it happens. BPMN does not contain such clarifications, it rather gives conditions within gateways.

Elements of UPN

The image below shows the UPN explanation. First, on the left, there is an arrow going in the right direction clarifying when does the event happen. Next, we have a box that provides multiple information: what happens describes the action in an event, who is responsible covers the responsible user for the event, and what systems are used explains which systems are part of the event. In addition, you can include a specific attachment or allow a drill-down feature if there is a specific subprocess within the event. Lastly, on the right, there is an arrow showing in the right direction that explains why the event occurs.

Process management always depends on the target audience and their expertise within information and process management. One of the crucial UPN benefits is that it clarifies process discovery for all levels of customer’s expertise.

Related insights:

Process Improvement – from complex to ideal process

What is Business Process Management – Definition, Types, Steps [+Infographic]

Business Process Intelligence – the key to effective workflows

It has come to light that the most significant factor in process understanding is having a universal notation for process modeling that does not require expert knowledge. UPN notation supports just that. When a process engages different departments, which include workers with different levels of process modeling expertise, UPN has shown to be more efficient since it does not require prior knowledge. Another benefit is that UPN allows process mapping – creating a hierarchical structure of processes that contain a drill-down feature to examine different process layers.

Benefits of UPN notation

• No prior knowledge required
• Easy to understand → high transparency
• Easier collaboration among different users → everyone can understand the diagram
• Allows focus on process results/outputs rather than activities → provides a wider perspective on a process → not all users/stakeholders want to analyze events but rather understand inputs and outputs
• A minor and comprehensive range of notation objects and features → notation complexity reduced significantly
• Hierarchical approach → drill-down to sub-processes
• Supports a very wide business audience

In conclusion, choosing the right process notation still depends on the level of process knowledge that a subject has. While BPMN became widely used by process managers, the importance of wider process understanding calls for a universal approach to process modeling. UPN emerged as an excellent solution for cross-functional organizations where stakeholders with different expertise in processes have to understand what a specific process brings to an organization.

Processes present a structural approach to providing services and products, but they also reflect the way internal business is managed. If a process is not well-defined or acknowledged by employees who use it, it can affect the organization at it’s core.

Sometimes even if the users understand company’s processes, they are not fully aware of their complexity. Because these workflows are executed on a daily basis, people can lose the sense of what could go wrong within a process. They can think ideally and assume a process is not complex, while the reality could be completely different.

What we realized working on business process management projects is that there are always three different perceptions of a process:

• an ideal
• expected
• and real,

Understanding different perceptions of a process

An ideal process model is what a customer desires or imagines that the process should look like. Such perception is usually very simple, like the one in the picture below, meaning that there are basically no different scenarios or any conditions that force a workflow to complicate. An ideal process model is usually perceived as a straightforward one-by-one stage process, where there is no branching.

An expected process model is the way users perceive a process from their viewpoint. More specifically, users create subjective perceptions based on their level of engagement within the process. So we end up with various process versions, depending on the user’s involvement in it.

The potential challenge with such notion is that users think a specific process is working perfectly and can’t anticipate the issues that can occur. That’s why there is a need to have a data-driven analysis which would give us the right process insights in order to improve.

To achieve that and have a clear perception of processes, we need to analyze them by taking valid evidence – event logs. Such datatype ensures we get a realistic viewpoint of a specific process – the real process model.

We can identify the real process model by taking event logs from a process and executing a process mining algorithm, usually as part of a process mining technology (we use ABBYY Timeline and Process Advisor), that creates a process based on data.

Such perspective shows how the process truly works, which in most cases contains complex scenarios and conditions, as the picture below shows.

Process improvement – from real to the ideal process

In order to improve our processes, the first thing to do is to collect all three perspectives:

• the real process model based on event logs,
• an expected process model created from users’ input, and
• an ideal process that is the desired outcome of the project.

Then, we can compare their similarities and determine a roadmap to get from the actual to the ideal process.

Conformance checking – comparing the process models

Such comparison is called conformance checking. First, we need to interview the users to get their perception of the process, and then compare their input with the process event logs. Analyzing the expected version in relation to the real is necessary so that we can understand how different both versions of the same process are, and what should be improved in order to align one to another.

Aspects of the organization that affect the improvement of the process

The path from actual to ideal process depends on many aspects, such as

• the willingness of an organization to change and improve its functionalities,
• adjusting technology solutions towards today’s expectations or needs,
• redefining objectives and opportunities within a process, and
• adjusting process complexity

In most cases, the situation leads to a compromise between the ideal and the actual, resulting in an improved expected process. In order to achieve a process where there are no more issues, it’s important to include these aspects of process improvement:

1. Decision-making
   Each process consists of different scenarios that are defined by specific conditions between events. Most of these conditions are business rules that were defined by organization’s needs. However, it’s important to narrow down only to business scenarios that bring significant value to the outcome. Therefore, by analyzing and comparing individual process variants, we can prioritize the ones that occur more often and bring significant value, while removing and restricting scenarios that do not contribute to the final outcome.
   
2. Process filtering
   The main goal is to remove any redundancy within events, conditions, or resources in a process. To do so, it’s important to understand the main values and priorities among process objects. By having a transparent definition of priorities and what objects mostly affect positive process outcomes, we can remove redundant steps or resources. In addition, some scenarios within a process could be driven by repetition rather than decision-making purposes. Such loops that happen due to misunderstanding process capabilities should be inspected and removed.

Taking into consideration these aspects, identifying the values and priorities of the process will result in improvements. That leads to better understanding of the process, and consequentially a more productive environment.

Conclusion

In most cases, the ideal process is overly simplified to be included in the organization. That is, a process model should always be designed according to the real capabilities of the organization. On the other hand, an actual process model based on event logs may seem too complex.

So what is the solution? An actual process model can be refined by focusing only on the most important variants of a process. We should prioritize the scenarios that occur daily and bring value to the organization.

It’s crucial to be aware of both the client’s and analyst’s perspectives while analyzing the process, because they come from different domains and perceive the process differently. In the end, there is no proper process understanding if there is no data-driven analysis by extracting event logs and modeling a process.

For process analysis, we use ABBYY Timeline. Timeline is a process mining tool which reconstructs the original process instances step-by-step from event logs, even if they come from multiple sources. We get fast and accurate results to interpret and act on.

Process Advisor is a process mining tool from the Microsoft Power Platform. New update allows importing data, making it an accessible tool for customers.

Processes are the vital business component that holds an organization and affects the business value of a company. In order to use them for improvement, such processes must be discovered, analyzed, improved and monitored in order to result in significant business value. That’s when Business Process Intelligence comes into the picture.

Processes are the core of each organization. Therefore, without structured workflows, there is no efficient production of a solution for customers.

Business Process Intelligence is a way to improve business processes using a big-picture view and deep-dive analysis

Business Process Intelligence (BPI) refers to the application of Business Intelligence (BI) techniques to business processes. In order to attract and retain customers, as well as business partners, organizations need to provide their services (i.e., execute their processes) with high, consistent, and predictable quality.

Understanding processes entails acquiring business value and structuring the organization of the company. Analyzing processes helps to understand potential optimization or drawback of each process. Monitoring processes consists of tracking the progress of a process and adjusting it according to business needs. In conclusion, business process intelligence gives value to business by organizing and optimizing processes.

BPI solves common process structuring challenges

Business Process Intelligence methodology tackles these challenges by analyzing the organization’s process landscape which leads to optimization and improvement of these issues:

1. Process misconception
   • Unawareness of process possibilities
   • Ignorance of process behavior
2. Inefficient processes
   • Many unfinished processes
   • Processes that are time-consuming
   • Failed processes
3. Insignificant Product
   • Lacking value
   • Low Customer Satisfaction
   • High risks

Why should you implement Business Process Intelligence

Each organization bases its work on processes. These workflows are crucial for efficient and productive creation of the outcome – products, knowledge or solutions. Therefore, processes affect the product’s quality. Clearly, there are various components that affects the process: cost, product, employees, time, risks.

With BPI, these components become optimized. BPI approach enables us to understand process behavior and its possible bottlenecks. As the processes get defined and optimized, so does the organization in the company.

The value of Business Process Intelligence for companies is in the understanding of the process. With BPI you can find root causes of bottlenecks and take action in eliminating those issues. Having clear knowledge of process advantages and drawbacks leads to process improvement. Finally, BPI approach results in process controlling, which is a constant awareness of a workflow’s progress, alerting and monitoring that ensures the stability and proper execution of the process.

Benefits of Business Process Intelligence

BPI offers numerous benefits for businesses. It equips companies with easy to understand, insightful and actionable business information which affect company’s structure and business performance:

• Production (Increment) increase
  • Efficiency increase
  • Improved strategies
  • Quality increase
• Lowering costs
  • Identifying wasted resources and reducing inventory costs
  • Eliminating report backlog and delays
  • Improving operational efficiency
• Risks decrease
  • Better decision-making about processes, based on acquired insights about finished processes
• Process Quality increase
  • Improving a process by dealing with drawbacks and other issues that were identified in the process analysis
• Customer Satisfaction increase
  • Improved process influences the product quality and efficient engagement with the customer, for example, improving Customer Support workflow directly affects customer satisfaction

Related articles:

Why every company should implement Process Mining

What is Business Process Management

Steps of BPI

Business Process Intelligence consists of five steps:

1. Discovery The analysis of business events recorded in event logs to discover process, control data, organizational and social structures
   • Understanding the process
   • Value of the process
   • Identification of process components, influences and cost
2. Analysis BPI allows users to analyze completed process executions from both business and IT perspective
   • Finished vs Active processes
   • Transparency of a workflow
   • Effective benchmarking
3. Prediction
   • BPI derives prediction models and apply such models to running processes, to identify in particular the possibility of exceptions or undesired behavior
4. Monitoring
   • BPI monitors and analyses running process instances, and informs the user of unusual or undesired situations
5. Optimization (Improvement)
   • BPI identifies areas of improvement in business process definitions and in the assignment of resources and services to work activities

Takeaway

Business Process Intelligence enables you to collect, integrate, analyze and present raw data into insightful and actionable business information to improve and optimize decision-making and performance. It is a way to improve business processes using a big-picture view and deep-dive analysis.

Working on a lower level, in-depth process mining tool, such as ABBYY Timeline enables you to understand situations between events and their possible bottlenecks. On the other hand, business intelligence software, as Microsoft Power BI, enables you to see the bigger picture – understand the process as a whole – how much it costs, how many projects are finished, etc. Those tools combined make a powerful means for companies to improve their business performance.

Want to see the value of BPI on your organization? Let’s talk about your processes!

References:

1. Bendel, M. (2004). The Business Value of Business Intelligence.

Key points:

• Process Mining is a method of analyzing process behavior and the situation between every event
• The technique aims to understand the relations between events, how they affect each other and what are their strengths/weaknesses
• Process Mining provides knowledge of what valuable advantages and crucial drawbacks of a process are
• Based on event logs, Process Mining can easily understand a process and its behavior

Why do we need Process Mining

People and organizations are surrounded by various processes on a daily basis. These processes are incorporated in every domain a person can imagine, from patient reception in a hospital, to customer claims. Most of us are not aware of it, but a majority of organizations such as post offices, governmental institutions, and businesses rely heavily on their processes.

Without structured workflows that define roles, responsibilities, milestones, and increments, the results of work would be expensive, and unproductive.

There is an constant need to improve and support business processes in today’s competitive and rapidly changing environments. Therefore, business processes need to be well-defined and maintained regularly.

The easiest way to understand the necessity of processes is that the quality of the process is in direct correlation with minimized risk, cost, and time, while the effectiveness is growing.

Because processes are so crucial, it is essential to understand that entropy affects them; they gradually decay due to the changes in their working environment. Therefore, it is necessary to readjust workflows according to the situation and objectives.

With the rapid technological development, processes became more valuable, and, luckily, easier to monitor and analyze. And with this comes the challenge of exploiting data in a meaningful way – to provide insights, identify bottlenecks, anticipate problems, record policy violations, recommend countermeasures, and streamline processes. Process Mining aims to do exactly that.

What is Process Mining

Process Mining (PM) is an emerging discipline that aims to provide fact-based insights and to support process improvements. It emerged out of Business Process Management (BPM) as a logical progress of combining Computer Science with Process Management.

By combining Data Mining and Business Process Management, data gathered from user interaction gets its meaning and purpose.

Process Mining is an intersection between Data Mining and Business Process Management. In fact, it is the “missing link” between Data Mining and traditional model-driven BPM. While Data Mining provides a development perspective with algorithms that analyze event logs, BPM serves as an analytical perspective for processes that recognizes bottlenecks and provides solutions, such as optimization and monitoring. By combining both approaches, gathered data gets its meaning and purpose.

The goal of Process Mining is to use event data to draw out process related information, e.g., to automatically discover a process model by observing events recorded by some system or to check the conformance of a given model by comparing it with reality. Process mining techniques are able to extract knowledge from event logs commonly available in today’s information systems. Therefore, these techniques provide new means to discover, monitor, and improve processes in a variety of fields.

What is an Event Log

In order to use Process Mining techniques to analyze and monitor specific processes, first we need data. Process Mining data are called Event Logs, and they contain a set of events that refer to the particular process.

Every Event Log file contains:

• timestamp or any form of date and time notation (to know when the specific action or event occurred)
• event name (to identify which specific event happened)
• case ID (to identify the timeline in which the event occurred)

Since the process repeats for immense number of times, case ID defines which specific timeline the event occurred.

Now, with this information, we are ready to analyze a process, its timelines and events. It is crucial to discuss and arrange the data requirement before the Process Mining analysis starts. The reason for such is mostly because of information collision and shortage with introducing or excluding specific attributes to/from the Event Log.

Additionally, many other attributes can provide more information about the process.

Analyze the efficiency of your employees

One of the great examples are users, for which we get another vital dimension to analyze. By providing which user interacted in specific events, we can then analyze employee’ efficiency, monitor their progress, and get insights on whether they complete tasks in the critical period. Another attribute is cost, which allows us to analyze the funds an organization spends for a specific process, and the optimized process results in cost reduction.

Five Stages of Process Mining

Here are five most important stages of Process Mining:

1. Gathering event logs
2. Data extraction
3. Analyzing cases
4. Optimization
5. Monitoring

Process Mining Benefits

The most important reason why Process Mining is rapidly becoming popular among various organizations is because of the benefits that it provides. Firstly, we get a detailed understanding of a process that we are interested in. Second, Process Mining allows analysis of the process so that the organization can see the overall performance of the process and the performance of users included in the process.

From the results of the analysis, we can make decisions for improvement and optimization. This means that Process Mining allows both analysis and adjustment of the process, which results in an updated process that has better performance than earlier.

Time, Cost, Quality, Efficiency and Risk – crucial performance metrics for Process Mining

After the process has been analyzed and optimized, we can expect that the time for the process to be completed would decrease. Cost would also go down since we spend less time in the process, and risk is reduced since we have knowledge of potential bottlenecks that are being solved. Furthermore, quality of increment that results from the process can be improved, and efficiency increased since we take less time to complete the process.

Takeaway

Process Mining is an method of analyzing process behaviour with a goal of understanding the relations between events, how they affect each other, as well as their strengths and weaknesses. As a result, it gives us the knowledge of valuable information we can leverage and the knowledge of crucial drawbacks of a process we can eliminate.

ABBYY Timeline is a leading Process Mining and Process Intelligence platform designed to help organizations discover how current processes work, identify bottlenecks, point out the possibilities of optimization and predict future outcomes by following these steps:

• ABBYY Timeline creates a “digital twin” of the event data from different systems
• Analyzes the performance of processes
• Monitors process behaviors in real time
• Conducts AI/ML-based predictive analytics to allow users to identify the outcome or performance of any process case in the early stages of the process execution

Are you ready to improve your processes and increase your business process efficiency? Let’s talk!

References:

Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mendling, J., & Reijers, H. A. (2013). Fundamentals of business process management (Vol. 1, p. 2). Heidelberg: Springer.

Van Der Aalst, W., Adriansyah, A., De Medeiros, A. K. A., Arcieri, F., Baier, T., Blickle, T., … & Wynn, M. (2011, August). Process mining manifesto. In International Conference on Business Process Management Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Van Der Aalst, W. M. (2011, April). Process mining: discovering and improving Spaghetti and Lasagna processes. In 2011 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Data Mining (CIDM) IEEE.

Busines Process Management has become a hot topic in the information management world. And for a good reason. Every company starting their digital transformation journey should incorporate BPM, no matter the size of business. Here’s a guide to what Business Process Management is and why every company needs it.

Business Process Management (BPM) is a method of discovering, analyzing and improving organization’s processes. It is a field that offers value in any type of organization and for many different purposes. Regardless, the outcome is always the same – acquiring knowledge about a process.

BPM is the art and science of overseeing how work is performed in an organization to ensure consistent outcomes and take advantage of improvement opportunities.

Dumas, La Rosa, Mendling & Reijers (2013)

The outcome of the analysis are insights that shows us how processes behave. It reveals the existence of bottlenecks and room for improvement. With these insights, we are able to improve a process and monitor it.

BPM – a foundation for every organization

BPM combines knowledge of information technology with management sciences and applies it to operational business processes. What makes BPM a widely used discipline gaining popularity every day is the ability to be implemented in any domain. Every organization bases its business on organized processes. Since every product is created, developed, and produced in a specific flow, BPM is vital to inspect those processes. As a result, organizations are able to improve their performance – reduce time spent working on a specific product and decrease the risk of uncompleted or unsuccessful processes. Furthermore, efficiency increase, increments’ growth and gaining more satisfied customers is what BPM could give to the process and its organization. The reasons for implementing BPM are numerous, and outcomes even greater.

The outcomes of Business Process Management

• Business and Process Understanding

The goal of BPM is to understand the processes and make them more efficient and agile. In order to do that, the first step is to understand the quantity and quality of the business processes and break them down into steps to optimize them for maximum efficiency.

• Process Awareness

Good process awareness is an important condition for the success of business processes as it assures that the people know their roles and contributions in the workflows. The higher the process awareness, the deeper the engagement into the process, therefore the better the result.

• Process Management

BPM enables companies to analyze processes, identify and remove bottlenecks and unnecessary steps, and afterwards, to keep track of the efficiency of processes, and optimize if necessary.

• Process Measurability

Setting measurable objectives is a prerequisite of process analysis, monitoring and optimizing and essential for a proper execution of a process. Monitoring and evaluating process efficiency is the ground for building a measurement system to ensure a successful business growth.

Five steps of Business Process Management

Business process management consists of five steps – process discovery, analysis, redesign, implementation and monitoring processes. Because these five aspects are broad, they are developing into their own fields within the discipline. By creating collaboration with other disciplines and their fields, unique aspects of BPM emerged.

Areas emerged from Business Process Management

In the picture below, we present a Venn diagrams that contain BPM as the foundation discipline for new areas.

Process Intelligence (PI) is a field that emerged from an intersection between BPM and Business Intelligence (BI), as a reporting aspect on a process. Using BI techniques for analyzing and creating reports, we are focusing on processes and analyzing their performances in the reports.

Process Mining (PM) became very popular in the recent years when Data Mining (DM) started to produce algorithms to interpret event logs of processes. By combining the Computer Science mechanism of understanding events, patterns of events’ occurrence and their performance, Process Mining is giving insights into both process discovery and analysis. Lastly, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) development, BPM got a new perspective on optimizing the process by automating its specific components, called Business Process Automation (BPA). This means that by using intelligence from earlier discoveries of Process Intelligence and Process Mining, we can detect which stages could be automated. This intersection between BPM and AI allows us to work on process improvement.

Related articles:

Why every company should implement Process Mining

Business Process Intelligence – the key to effective workflows

How does Decision-Making Process work

Business Process Management has become a core solution for improving processes. By adding other three perspectives (PI, PM and BPA), all aspects for discovering, analysis, monitoring and optimization are covered. It is a starting point for digital transformation, becoming an invaluable asset for growth of businesses of any size and type.

Take a look at the infographic below: