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Chapter 1
Introduction

Wil van der Aalst, Michael Adams, Arthur ter Hofstede, and Nick Russell

1.1 Overview

The area of Business Process Management (BPM) has received considerable
attention in recent years due to its potential for significantly increasing productiv-
ity and saving cost. In BPM, the concept of a process is fundamental and serves
as a starting point for understanding how a business operates and what opportu-
nities exist for streamlining its constituent activities. It is therefore not surprising
that the potential impact of BPM is wide-ranging and that its introduction has both
managerial as well as technical ramifications.
While benefits can be derived from BPM even when its application is restricted
to what can be described as “pen-and-paper” exercises, such as the visualization of
business process models in order to discuss opportunities for change and improve-
ment, there is potentially much more to be gained if such an analysis serves as the
blueprint for subsequent automation of key business processes. In the area of Busi-
ness Process Automation (BPA), sometimes referred to as workflow management,
precise business process descriptions are used to guide the performance of business
activities. Work is delivered to selected resources, which can be either humans or
software applications, when it needs to be executed. Progress can be monitored and
may give rise to the escalation of certain tasks where their deadline has passed or
is not likely to be met. Events, such as the completion of a certain task by a cer-
tain resource, are logged and the resulting log files can be exploited for analysis
purposes, an area of interest in its own right typically referred to as process mining.
Substantial cost and time savings can be achieved through the use of workflow
technology. When describing a workflow, which is an executable process, one has
to capture all aspects relevant to automation, such as the individual activities (or
tasks) and their execution order, data that is to be entered and passed on, and the
way resources are involved. By taking this holistic view of a business process and
capturing both the tasks and the data involved, it is less likely that inconsisten-
cies arise from data not being entered or updated during the execution of a certain

W. van der Aalst (B )
Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, the Netherlands
e-mail: w.m.p.v.d.aalst@tue.nl

A.H.M. ter Hofstede et al. (eds.), Modern Business Process Automation, 3
DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-03121-2 1, c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010