Business process analysis plays a critical role in systematically evaluating business operations to identify inefficiencies, compliance risks, and opportunities for improvement. It relies on both qualitative insights, such as process documentation, and quantitative data extracted from process execution. However, traditional approaches—including waste analysis and process mining—often fall short in addressing sustainability concerns and effectively visualizing complex analytical insights. This talk presents recent advancements in sustainability-oriented process analysis and the visualization of process analysis results, grounded in two key research contributions.
First, we introduce SOPA (Sustainability-Oriented Process Analysis and Re-design), a framework that integrates Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) with Activity-Based Costing (ABC) to assess the environmental impact of business processes. SOPA enables sustainability analysis using either process execution data or simulation-based data, providing a structured approach for organizations to evaluate and mitigate their environmental footprint. I will present the conceptual foundation of SOPA and its practical implementation.
Second, we address the visualization gap in process analysis on the example of conformance checking, a core process mining operation used to assess whether observed process executions align with predefined models. It can be for example used to assess whether business processes comply with regulatory regarding reducing the environmental impact (e.g., EU taxonomy). Despite its significance, conformance checking remains underutilized in existing process mining tools due to the lack of intuitive and effective visualization techniques. To tackle this, we propose a task taxonomy for conformance checking visualization, offering a structured framework to guide the design of visualization tools that enhance the interpretability of compliance results for diverse stakeholders.
By integrating sustainability-driven process analysis, regulatory conformance checking, and advanced visual analytics, this talk aims to expand the capabilities of Business Process Analysis.