A goal-oriented approach for business process improvement using process warehouse data

Abstract

In a process-oriented enterprise management, process optimization focuses on studying and evaluating existing processes, such as utilization of resources and identification of problems in the process flow and functionality, for facilitating potential improvements. Conventional data warehouses do not provide information necessary for studying processes, such as executed process activities, utilized resources, or control-flow. Thereby, decisions on process improvements either cannot be taken, or they are taken without complete information. Additionally, process improvements methods commonly suffer from a number of limitations with respect to their complexity, efficiency and degree of automation. In this study, we consider process-oriented data warehouses and thereby we identify the information required from such awarehouse, to facilitate a semi-automatic method for improving processes, starting from established business goals toward concrete decisions. A case study from the Swedish health care sector is used to ground and illustrate the presented method. © 2009 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.