Supporting Business Process Improvement through Business Process Weakness Pattern Collections

A main task of Business Process Management is to identify weaknesses in business processes that may result in monetary or quality-related drawbacks in order to eliminate them subsequently. A common way to identify weaknesses is to analyze process models. While this has traditionally been done manually, recent work proposes using automatic model query approaches promising time and money savings. Query approaches take (weakness) patterns as input and return all process model subsections that match these patterns, hence may be subject to weaknesses. Although numerous model query approaches have been developed, collections of weaknesses do virtually not exist. To exploit the benefits of model querying, a weakness collection would be highly desirable. In this paper, we provide a first version of a weakness pattern collection, which we identified in an empirical study on several hundreds of weakness-afflicted process models and assess its usefulness through applying it to another process model collection.