Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) is a discipline that marries business and IT perspectives with the ultimate goal of improving an organisation’s performance, by using a business process lens. BPM sets out to increase the effectiveness, efficiency and compliance of an organisation, is a significant contributor to its overall productivity and competitiveness, and also a key enabler of organisational innovation and transformation. Its principles, methods and tools have been widely applied in many organisations in different industries around the world. BPM as a research stream now faces the important challenge of scaling up existing methods and tools to deal with an increasing amount of complex process-related data on the one hand, and heterogeneous technologies on the other hand, in order to satisfy a multitude of organisational needs.

Within this theme, our research focuses on the following research pillars:

Process automation

Process automation is concerned with the automated enactment of business processes by a supporting software system. It studies technical aspects such as the definition of executable process specifications using established process-aware information systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and BPM systems, as well as emerging technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and the Blockchain. It also studies the impact of process automation technology in practice.

Sample projects

Accelerating the Adoption of Robotic Process Automation via Process Mining (Volodymyr Leno, Marcello La Rosa, Artem Polyvyanyy)

Process mining

Process mining is an evidence-based approach to managing business processes. It encompasses a range of techniques and software tools to discover, analyse and monitor business processes by extracting knowledge from transactional event data recorded by enterprise systems or acquired through sensors technology. Process mining provides evidence-based insights on how business processes are effectively performed within an organization. These insights can in turn be used to support targeted process improvement initiatives and to measure their impact.

Sample projects

Apromore – Advanced Process Analytics Platform (Marcello La Rosa, Simon Raboczi, Abel Armas Cervantes, Adriano Augusto, Artem Polyvyanyy, Bruce Nguyen, Daniel Reissner, Volodymr Leno, Ilya Verenich)
ARC Discovery Project 2018: “Learning from the Good and the Bad: Diagnosing and Prediction of Business Process Deviances” (Marcello La Rosa, Artem Polyvyanyy)
ARC Discovery Project 2015: “Liquid Process Model Collections” (Marcello La Rosa, Abel Armas Cervantes, Bruce Nguyen)
Improving Quality of Process Event Logs (Marcello La Rosa)
Incremental and Interpretable Process Conformance Checking (Abel Armas Cervantes, Marcello La Rosa)
Process Mining in Healthcare (Nyree Taylor, Reeva Lederman, Marcello La Rosa)
Quality Measures in Process Mining (Daniel Reissner, Adriano Augusto, Artem Polyvyanyy, Marcello La Rosa)
Robust Automated Process Discovery (Adriano Augusto, Marcello La Rosa)
Stage-Aware Business Process Mining (Bruce Nguyen, Marcello La Rosa)

Process theory

Process theory studies concepts and principles for modelling and analysing dynamic systems, including verification of formal properties of the systems, and their behavioural equivalence and correctness analysis. It penetrates different areas of BPM, ranging from process discovery from transactional data of process-aware information systems, studied within process mining, through to process querying methods for filtering and manipulating models that describe executed and designed processes.

Sample projects

Axiomatic Process Theory (Artem Polyvyanyy)
Process Querying (Artem Polyvyanyy, Marcello La Rosa)

Smart and sustainable supply chain management

Smart and sustainable supply chain management is concerned with the adoption and effective use of IT to integrate inter-organisational business processes within supply chains. Through data identification, automatic data capture and data sharing principles and mechanisms, organisations are able to collaborate with trading partners efficiently, effectively and sustainably to improve economic, environmental and social performance.

Sample projects

Creating Sustainable Supply Chains with ICT-Enabled Innovations (Sherah Kurnia)
Enhancing Supply Chain Management through Adoption of Business-to-Business Electronic Commerce Technologies (Sherah Kurnia)
Inter-Organisational Information Systems Adoption Maturity and the Impact on Supply Chain Triple Bottom Line Performance (Sherah Kurnia)