What Proportion of Industrial Business Processes Are Undocumented or Invalid?

Abstract

One of the success factors of business process outsourcing (BPO) is a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the business processes that are outsourced. However, such business processes are often undocumented, and discovering them is difficult and time-consuming for BPO service providers. Previously, we introduced an approach for business process discovery that uses swim lanes to recognize that different parts of the process may be performed by different parts of an organization. It generates the business process from an event log and user information extracted from an existing system. This paper examines whether the approach aids the engineers and consultants of the providers who need to investigate business processes of organizations (i.e., their customers of which they do not have sufficient knowledge) discovering the undocumented business processes of the target organization. To do so, we surveyed an industrial workflow system from which we collected data about 2,000 events and 269 users for a two-year period of the system's operation. We conducted a study on the case through document analysis and expert interviews. Our evaluation showed that 46% of the process patterns were undocumented, and 36% of these were invalid patterns. The approach is a valuable process visualization for identifying knowledge that is not documented nor recognized even by experts in organizations.