Supporting business process analysis via data warehousing

Today, business processes serve as the backbone of organizations. As a result, IT frameworks for managing business processes are gaining in popularity. The classical life cycle implemented in these frameworks consists of four stages: process specification, process implementation, process execution and monitoring, and process analysis. The relationships between the stages are usually loosely defined, and there is a need for means to synchronize these stages, in light of the frequent changes in and the need to maintain the entire business process life cycle. In this paper, we propose a method for constructing data warehouse schemata from business process specifications to facilitate the off-line analysis of the business process execution. We define the relationships between the business process specification stage and the analysis stages, with the aim to facilitate and to identify potential improvements by querying the business process performance. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.