Introduction

The area of Business Process Management (BPM) has received considerable attention in recent years due to its potential for significantly increasing productivity 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 opportunities 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 improvement, 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 Business 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 certain 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.