On the definition and analysis of process performance indicators

Abstract

A key aspect in any process-oriented organisation is the evaluation of process performance for the achievement of its strategic and operational goals. Process Performance Indicators (PPIs) are a key asset to carry out this evaluation, and, therefore, having an appropriate definition of these PPIs is crucial. After a thorough review of the literature related and a study of the current picture in different real organisations, we conclude that there not exists any proposal that allows defining PPIs in a way that is unambiguous and highly expressive, understandable by technical and non-technical users and traceable with the Business Process (BP). Furthermore, it is also increasingly important to provide these PPI definitions with support to automated analysis allowing implicit information to be extracted from them and their relationships with the BP. This information can assist process analysts in the definition and evolution of PPIs, as well as in the evaluation and optimization of the BPs associated. The challenge we face in this thesis is to devise a set of techniques and tools to allow such an advanced definition of PPIs and their subsequent automated analysis. In order to face this challenge we first propose a metamodel that allows unambiguous and highly expressive PPI definitions, as far as we know, it supports PPI definitions that could not be expressed yet, i.e. PPIs not only related to time or control flow, supported by most existing approaches, but also those related to the state of BP elements and to the content or certain restriction of data, amongst others. Regarding the understandability, we propose a BPMN-like graphical notation and a set of templates and linguistic patterns inspired in successful approaches from the requirements engineering field. Both representations rely on the metamodel and can be automatically mapped from one to each other. Furthermore, we provide an automatic semantic mapping from the metamodel to Description Logics (DL), that allows the implementation of design-time analysis operations in such a way that DL reasoners¿ facilities can be leveraged. Finally, we have developed PPINOT Tool Suite, providing support for all these contributions, as well as the possibility to extract the information required to compute PPI values from Activiti, an open source BP management platform.