An integrated approach to process-driven business performance monitoring and analysis for real-time enterprises

Business process management systems (BPMSs) are increasingly gaining momentum as a software platform on which to define, execute, and track enterprise-wide business processes. BPMSs promise to facilitate automation, integration, and optimization of business processes in order to support decision making, increase operational efficiency, and lower the cost of doing business. In spite of the growing popularity, however, realization of the grand vision BPMSs ultimately seek to achieve calls for renewed focus on the holistic approach to continuous process improvement instead of on the process automation alone. In this paper, we present a framework, named xPIA (eXecutable Process Innovation Accelerator), which can effectively facilitate the continuous process improvement through enhancing monitoring capabilities for business data that can significantly affect process performances. In addition to the basic process-related data such as activity start and finish times, the proposed framework allows for monitoring other important business contents as well as events from various sources, including business process definitions, forms and documents, database management systems, enterprise applications, and web services. The presented results outline the key concepts and architectures of xPIA to realize such functionalities on top of contemporary BPMSs while at the same time addressing the implementation issues.