Towards a Context-Aware Analysis of Business Process Performance

Abstract

Context-aware business process management is moving into the focus of research interest. Since the environment is changing continuously, these changes influence business processes. Thus, the respective context has to be considered while analysing the performance of business processes. This paper presents a new methodological approach to identify the effect of contextual factors on business process performance in terms of processing time. For this purpose, we look at the level of activities within a business process. In a two-stage approach, process mining techniques are combined with statistical methods. This approach facilitates detecting impacted activities and thus determining which activities within a business process are indeed dependent on the context. The methodology is evaluated based on empirical data of an extensive case study from a bank’s loan application process. The results reveal that although some contextual factors have an impact on processing time, the effect is limited to certain activities.

Keywords: Context-aware, business process, process mining, performance analysis

JEL Classification: C13, D24, L23, L60, L80, M11