In business processes, an operational problem refers to a deviation and an inefficiency that prohibits an organization from reaching its goals, e.g., a delay in approving a purchase order in a Procure-To-Pay (P2P) process. Operational process monitoring aims to assess the occurrence of such operational problems by analyzing event data that record the execution of business processes. Once the problems are detected, organizations can act upon the corresponding problems with viable actions, e.g., adding more resources, bypassing problematic activities, etc. A plethora of approaches have been proposed to implement operational process monitoring. The lion’s share of existing approaches assumes that a single case notion (e.g., a purchase order in a P2P process) exists in a business process and analyzes operational problems defined over the single case notion. However, most real-life business processes manifest the interplay of multiple interrelated objects. For instance, an execution of an omnipresent P2P process involves multiple objects of different types, e.g., purchase orders, goods receipts, invoices, etc. Applying the existing approaches in these object-centric business processes results in inaccurate or misleading results. In this study, we propose a novel approach to assessing operational problems within object-centric business processes. Our approach not only ensures an accurate assessment of existing problems but also facilitates the analysis of object-centric problems that consider the interaction among different objects. We evaluate this approach by applying it to both simulated business processes and real-life business processes.

中文翻译：

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运营流程监控：以对象为中心的方法


在业务流程中，运营问题是指阻碍组织实现其目标的偏差和低效率，例如，在采购到付款 （P2P） 流程中延迟批准采购订单。操作流程监控旨在通过分析记录业务流程执行的事件数据来评估此类操作问题的发生。一旦检测到问题，组织就可以通过可行的行动来处理相应的问题，例如，添加更多资源、绕过有问题的活动等。已经提出了大量方法来实施运营过程监控。大部分现有方法都假设业务流程中存在单个案例概念（例如，P2P 流程中的采购订单），并分析在单个案例概念上定义的操作问题。但是，大多数实际业务流程都表现为多个相互关联的对象的相互作用。例如，无处不在的 P2P 流程的执行涉及多个不同类型的对象，例如采购订单、收货、发票等。在这些以对象为中心的业务流程中应用现有方法会导致结果不准确或具有误导性。在这项研究中，我们提出了一种评估以对象为中心的业务流程中的操作问题的新方法。我们的方法不仅确保对现有问题进行准确评估，还有助于分析考虑不同对象之间交互的以对象为中心的问题。我们通过将其应用于模拟业务流程和实际业务流程来评估这种方法。