Demonstrating the Effectiveness of Process Improvement Patterns with Mining Results?

Abstract. Improving the operational efficiency of processes is an im-portant goal of business process management (BPM). There exist many proposals with regard to process improvement patterns (PIPs) as prac-tices that aim at supporting this task. Nevertheless, there is still a gap with respect to validating PIPs in terms of their actual business value for a specific organization. Based on empirical research and experience from consulting projects, this paper proposes a method to tackle this chal-lenge. Our approach towards a-priori validation of process improvement patterns considers real-world constraints such as the role of senior stake-holders and opportunities such as process mining techniques. In the sense of an experience report, our approach as well as results are illustrated on the basis of a real-world business process from human resources manage-ment, covering a transactional volume of about 29,000 process instances over the period of one year. Overall, our proposal enables practitioners and researchers to subject PIPs to a sound validation procedure before taking any process implementation decision