A Business Process Explorer: Recovering Business Processes from Business Applications

A business process contains a set of logically related tasks executed to fulfill business goals. Business applications enable organizations to automatically perform their daily operations. Business processes and business applications keep on changing independently due to dynamic business environments. Therefore, business process definitions are rarely up-to-dated to reflect the processes deployed in business applications. This inconsistency creates difficulties for the communications between business analysts and software developers. We present a business process explorer tool which automatically recovers business processes from business applications and refines the process definitions by detecting business task clones which have similar functionality across processes.