Improving Business Process Model after Reverse Engineering

An appropriate business process management helps companies to quickly adapt to changes while their competitiveness is maintained or even improved. For this reason, business process models are recognized as being important assets for companies and companies are currently demanding mechanisms to ensure business processes with an appropriate quality degree. These business process models can be mined by reverse engineering from existing information systems. Regrettably, these reversed models usually have a lower quality degree and may not exactly reflect the actual business processes. This paper describes detected common problems in business processes retrieved by reverse engineering (e. g., missing, fine-grained or non-relevant elements, ambiguities, etc.). Refactoring is widely-used to fix quality problems in business process models. Despite this, this work suggests addressing the above problems by defining three stages: repairing, refactoring and expert-based improvement. Additionally, some preliminary results from refactoring stage are provided using real-life retrieved business process models.