In the world of business process management and business process automation, you can cross business intelligence with process mining and you get…process analytics.
What is process analytics?
We use the term process analytics to describe the use of process-related data to analyze and improve process performance - especially business processes across the enterprise that produce historical and real-time data that can be mined and presented in a form that permits analysis, better visibility, knowledge, and understanding about what is happening in those processes.
Why process analytics?
There are many situations in which end users want to visualize process related execution data, to have a clear representation of the process flow and/or to monitor and improve process execution. Business users have been requesting this capability for a long time now.
But developers don’t have a lot of options aside from custom development to provide this capability, which is time-consuming and not necessarily widely applicable.
In the world of Business Process Management and beyond, a re-usable, embeddable library for BPMN based projects should be a valuable resource for business application developers. We see process analytics as a sub-segment of Data Analytics, in which the data model is related to process execution use cases.
This is why Bonitasoft is supporting the open source Process Analytics Project.
What is the Process Analytics project?
The Process Analytics Project is an open source project (using the Apache license) that is developing visualization tools for developers to build ways for end users to display process execution data. The Process Analytics project has already produced a first set of libraries that can be easily integrated into existing applications and tools, to mine, analyze, and present process data using BPMN2 standard notation.
Why BPMN2 standard notation?
BPMN2 notation is a mature business process management standard. It is widely used when it’s important to understand the steps necessary to accomplish a particular goal, the order in which those steps need to be done, and who (person) or what (system) is responsible for completing those steps.
How are Process Analytics libraries useful across the business landscape?
Here are some examples of how these libraries can be used by developers in Business Process Management and beyond.
Business Process Management (BPM)
Integrating Process Analytics tools in the context of BPM allows developers to provide a clear visualization of automated processes and instances. They can also be coupled to advanced monitoring capabilities and used to optimize business processes.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Process Analytics libraries can be used to visualize RPA with process maps and thus easily monitor attended, unattended, and testing automation done by robots. Process analytics tools can also be used to mine data to use these libraries to create process maps.
Process Mining
Process Mining technologies can leverage Process Analytics libraries to enrich existing process discovery capabilities with BPMN2 semantics, to support process analytics and pinpoint areas for improvement.
Business Intelligence (BI) / Data Visualization
BI technologies can employ Process Analytics libraries to propose new data visualization types, for example using BPMN2 notation to display flow charts.
API Management
API management technologies can apply Process Analytics libraries to visualize and monitor the full lifecycle of APIs (design, publish, document, secure, and analyze).
Integration platforms as a service (iPaaS)
iPaaS solutions can integrate Process Analytics libraries to visualize and monitor the flow of integration between different services.
Web browsers and Integrated Development Environments (IDE’s)
When developers want to generate flow charts and/or processes directly from web browsers and/or their favorite IDE - for example, to generate documentation, support decision making, transfer of knowledge - they can use Process Analytics libraries.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
Developers can create ways to monitor the actual performance of running applications by using Process Analytics libraries to display process data that can be used to map application environments, visualize automation, identify problems through root-cause analysis, and assess the impact of identified issues.
Testing automation tools
Developers can use Process Analytics libraries to graphically visualize and monitor test automation scenarios (end-to-end tests, integration tests).
Continuous Integration and Continuous delivery (CI/CD)
DevOps teams can use Process Analytics libraries to simplify visualization, automation and test of builds.
Custom application development
Developers can embed Process Analytics libraries in their custom code when there is a need to graphically represent process execution in their application development projects.
How can a developer access and use Process Analytics?
The main library produced by the Process Analytics project is called bpmn-visualization. This is a TypeScript library for visualizing process data on BPMN diagrams, which includes:
- display options for execution data (highlight transitions, counters, and more)
- interactive capacities (mouse hover, click)
Detailed documentation and many real life examples are available for developers.
The Process Analytics GitHub organization page also offers a lot of information, including contribution guidelines.
In addition, to make Process Analytics libraries maximally useful, the team is creating additional libraries (called gateways) to smooth the integration/embeddability of Process Analytics.
For example, the bpmn-visualization - R Package is one of those gateways. It is useful to Process Mining vendors to visualize process data on BPMN diagrams, using overlays, style customization and interactions.
How is Bonitasoft using the output from the Process Analytics project?
The development team at Bonitasoft is using Process Analytics libraries for Bonita. Products from the Process Analytics Project have been integrated into the Bonita digital process automation platform beginning with the Bonita 2022.2 release, and improves the existing capabilities of Bonita for process visualization and monitoring.
