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Process Discovery

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Fundamentals of Business Process Management

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Abstract

The previous chapters showed how to create a BPMN model. This chapter goes further by showing how to create models that are both correct and complete. To this end, one needs to thoroughly understand the operation of a business process, and one needs to possess the technical skills to represent it in an appropriate BPMN model. These two types of skill are hardly ever unified in the same person. Hence, multiple stakeholders with different and complementary skills are typically involved in the construction of a process model.

This chapter presents the challenges faced by the stakeholders involved in the lead-up to a process model. Then, we discuss methods to facilitate effective communication and information gathering in this setting. Given the information gathered in this way, we show step by step how to construct a process and what criteria should be verified before a process model is accepted as an authoritative representation of a business process.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For simplicity, we only consider one supplier in this example, so for instance there is only one activity “Request raw materials” instead of “Request raw materials from Supplier 1” and “Request raw materials from Supplier 2”.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Marlon Dumas

  2. Queensland University of Technology and NICTA, Brisbane, Australia

    Marcello La Rosa

  3. Institute for Information Business, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria

    Jan Mendling

  4. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Hajo A. Reijers

Authors
  1. Marlon Dumas
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  2. Marcello La Rosa
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  3. Jan Mendling
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  4. Hajo A. Reijers
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Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mendling, J., Reijers, H.A. (2013). Process Discovery. In: Fundamentals of Business Process Management. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33143-5_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33143-5_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33142-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33143-5

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