Network-Based Business Process Analysis

This paper presents a quantitative approach to business process analysis using metrics from (social) network analysis. It is claimed that using this approach not only allows quantification of business process properties, but also provides insights on business process behavior that is not obvious from business process descriptions or models. The goal is to show that process characteristics can be explored and analyzed using network theory and methods of statistical analysis. The focus of this work is put on process type definition. To validate the approach business process model networks are evaluated against artificial networks with selected random graph distributions. The identified metrics are evaluated using a sample of real-life business processes.