business process analysts

Abstract: Process mining typically explains an event log with a single model, clustering, or classifier fitted to all cases, although real logs often mix cases that follow different sub-processes. Trace clustering separates sub-populations, but it fixes one notion of trace similarity for the whole analysis. We propose TracePrism, which treats process discovery as iterative partitioning with three characteristics. The trace encoding is adaptive: it is chosen for each working set of remaining traces from a library of encodings, with suggestions scored for that set. The partitioning is iterative: the analyst forms a candidate group based on a rule, a dominant topic, a cluster over topic weights, or a region of an embedding, accepts it if it is coherent in both process structure and outcome, and continues with the remaining traces. Decisions are revisable and recorded: a group can be reopened under a different working set or encoding, and the findings repository keeps both the earlier decision and its revision. We implement TracePrism as an open-source prototype and demonstrate it in usage scenarios on three real-world event logs. The scenarios also revealed behavior that we had not anticipated, such as process drift.

Abstract: Predictive Process Monitoring (PPM) forecasts future events of ongoing business processes based on event logs. However, deep learning PPM approaches are often limited by labeled data scarcity and the low variability of real-world logs. To address this, we introduce SiamSA-PPM, a self-supervised framework combining Siamese learning with statistically grounded data augmentation. It employs novel transformation methods that leverage control-flow semantics and frequent behavioral patterns to generate realistic, semantically valid trace variants, learning generalizable prefix representations without labeled supervision. Extensive experiments on real-world event logs with a wide range of variability, incorporating exhaustive hyperparameter tuning, demonstrate the value of this process-aware augmentation. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines, SiamSA-PPM achieves competitive or superior predictive performance in both next activity and final outcome prediction tasks. An open source implementation of our method is publicly available under https://github.com/SvStraten/SiamSA-PPM-Extension..

Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly expected to support enterprise workflows, where tasks often involve missing information, uncertainty, feedback, and long-term trade-offs. However, existing enterprise and financial benchmarks mainly test static capabilities such as information extraction, numerical calculation, domain knowledge, and financial QA, leaving interactive and long-horizon decision-making underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce EnterpriseBench, a benchmark that evaluates LLM agents across this spectrum, from static question answering to dynamic decision-making. Specifically, EnterpriseBench reorganizes existing enterprise and financial QA datasets into a unified foundational suite annotated by capability and difficulty, and introduces three professional interactive settings: Consulting, based on management-consulting-style business cases for client problem diagnosis through multi-turn information seeking; the Beer Game, adapted from a classic supply-chain management simulation for inventory control under delayed feedback; and Enterprise Digital Twin, a project-based business simulator for workforce, risk, and project planning. Experiments with nine agent methods under four backbone models show that current agents have not yet achieved stable, comprehensive, and cross-task reliability in enterprise scenarios. These results show that EnterpriseBench provides a practical benchmark for evaluating LLM agents in realistic enterprise strategic reasoning and decision-making.

Abstract: Based on an analysis of the role of language in thought and communication, this article proposes a new concept for designing corporate knowledge bases. The concept integrates the probabilistic vector space of a corporate vocabulary, reflect-ing industry specifics, subject focus, terminology, and culture, with traditional ontological modeling. This combination enables the efficient extraction of knowledge from accumulated corporate documents while strictly accounting for specific business processes. Consequently, this concept bridges statistical and semantic (cause-and-effect) methodologies. Furthermore, analyzing the projec-tions of probabilistic spaces and causal relationships can help identify bottlenecks in business logic. As a dynamic system, language functions as a separate, inde-pendent layer within the overall information architecture. Introducing a dynamic component into the probabilistic space of word distribution allows it to be mod-eled as a multidimensional solution space for various problem formulations. In this context, input data defining the problem conditions serve as control parame-ters for dynamic transformations.

Abstract: Many knowledge-work benchmarks are constructed around individual tasks, with the context needed for each task selected together with or after the task has been specified. This design measures performance on workplace-like tasks in an environment assembled for the task. When task specification guides which context is selected, the evaluation can encode task information into the environment and pre-complete part of the information-localization work that workplace performance normally requires. We introduce WorkWorlds, an evaluation infrastructure that separates organizational state from task specification. A world first fixes a revision, date, and employee seat and materializes the organizational state that employee can access; tasks are introduced only afterward. We implement WorkWorlds in a primary synthetic pharmaceutical company with 8 measured tasks across 6 employee seats, and construct additional organizational worlds. Across 192 matched evaluations, moving from task-curated context to the full role-visible workplace reduced evidence access from 90.4% to 74.5% and criterion pass from 79.4% to 68.2%, while pass conditional on evidence access remained nearly unchanged; most of the measured difference occurred before the agent reached sufficient evidence.

Abstract: Process model forecasting (PMF) aims to predict the process model that will characterize a future period, thereby providing a process-level view of how behavior is expected to evolve. Existing PMF methods, however, forecast directly-follows graphs, which cannot explicitly represent concurrency. We extend PMF to causal nets by forecasting time series of relation and binding counts and using these forecasts to reconstruct future process models with AND/XOR semantics. To evaluate the resulting models, we introduce a protocol that accounts for partial traces and constructs the workflow nets required for conformance checking. Experiments on four event logs show that the forecasted models achieve conformance levels close to those of models re-mined from observations in the corresponding future windows. They also outperform static discovery baselines, which retain high precision on the structurally stable log but exhibit substantial precision losses on the other three logs. Filtering infrequent bindings improves most conformance metrics, although it also removes much of the concurrent behavior captured by the models.

Abstract: Process discovery rarely yields a single coherent process structure. For analysis, a common step is to cluster process variants based on structural similarity and then assign business meaning to the resulting groups. Since these partitions are not derived from the organization's goals, analysts must manually interpret and consolidate variants into business-meaningful categories. This judgment-intensive step becomes increasingly difficult as the number and complexity of variants grow. In this paper, we propose a goal-driven approach to variant categorization that reverses this workflow. We first author an organization's goal model that predefines the categorization axis. Each variant is transformed into a textual narrative describing its behavior, and a Large Language Model (LLM) interprets it in the context of the goal model and assigns the variant to the most appropriate category. LLM-based semantic reasoning connects low-level process behavior with analyst-defined business goals. We instantiate this approach end-to-end and evaluate it on three public logs differing substantially in scale and behavioral diversity. Goal-model guidance yields partitions that differ from those produced by unguided induction and respond to controlled edits to the declared alternatives, at the cost of authoring a goal model.

Abstract: Operators of service-based systems act on forecasts of how a running execution will continue, and such a forecast is actionable only if its reliability is known. Mainstream deep-learning models for this task are discriminative and deterministic: they emit a single next activity and a single remaining-time estimate, without a distribution to reason over. We instead cast the problem as generative sequence modelling with marked temporal point processes, which define a joint density over the next mark and its inter-event time and therefore deliver predictive distributions by construction. Real event logs violate the simple-point-process assumption these models rest on, since consecutive events frequently carry identical timestamps; we handle such ties explicitly and combine a transformer encoder with a mixture decoder over inter-event times, trained by exact log-likelihood. On ten public logs, the resulting model matches discriminative baselines on point accuracy, dominates them on the calibration and sharpness of remaining-time distributions, and is the cheapest at inference, since a full predictive distribution is obtained in a single forward pass without sampling.

Abstract: One hospital runs bloods and imaging at the same time. Another runs them one after the other, in either order, equally often. Knowing which actually happened, and how it is recorded in data, is critical for all operational managers. In process mining, the standard approach is to construct an event log, and attempt to discover concurrent and sequential processes in a data-driven way. We show this standard approach, built on the stochastic language of an event log, reports only the assumptions of its discovery algorithm, because every such log is explained equally well by a model with no concurrency at all. Further, before any data is acquired, we characterise when data can and cannot distinguish concurrent behaviour. Where it cannot, the distinction is recoverable from evidence the stochastic language discards, such as the times at which activities start and end, or object-centric records that fix an order within an execution. The remedy is therefore a choice of what is recorded, rather than a larger sample. This impacts decision making, as planning resource for truly concurrent services is very different from sequential services.

Abstract: Complete suffix prediction is challenging in sequential decision settings, where the same prefix can remain compatible with several plausible suffixes. We propose a graphbased metric-learning framework that reformulates complete suffix prediction as latent retrieval over process graphs. Prefixes and suffixes are represented as directed attributed graphs and encoded by edge-conditioned graph neural networks, allowing event-level activities and transition-level durations to be modelled jointly. Prefix representations are projected into the latent suffix space through a predictor trained with a joint reconstruction and contrastive objective strengthened using process-aware hard negatives. To stabilise the learned retrieval geometry, spectral normalisation, and retrieval robustness, spectral normalisation is applied to enforce a Lipschitz constraint on both encoders and predictor. Experiments on two real-life process datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves the best overall results across nearly all evaluated criteria. It improves semantic suffix accuracy measured by normalized Damerau-Levenshtein distance, yields strong retrieval quality through Recall@1, Recall@5, and MRR@5, and maintains temporal plausibility according to Mean Absolute Error. These results show that graph-based latent retrieval is an effective alternative to sequential suffix prediction for recommendation-oriented process monitoring under structural and KPI-related constraints.

Abstract: Predictive Process Monitoring (PPM) aims at predicting at runtime and as early as possible the future states of a process execution. Common tasks include predicting the next event, the time to completion of a trace, and outcomes. Existing approaches typically consider an event from the perspective of the executed activities along with their timestamps and case identifiers. This leads to the disadvantage that in real-life settings, there is much more information recorded in the event log that is not captured or completely ignored when performing prediction tasks. We introduce GNN4PPM, an approach that predicts all next events along with their complete data payload at once. We represent event information in a heterogeneous knowledge graph that captures the event log as an RDF semantics, and train the embeddings with a Relational Graph Convolutional Network (R-GCN). Our approach is promising in comparison to existing solutions, and experiments with state-of-the-art solutions prove the accuracy and applicability of GNN4PPM in complex settings.

Abstract: Predictive Process Monitoring (PPM) forecasts how ongoing organizational processes unfold, enabling information systems to move beyond execution support toward proactive analysis and monitoring. Although deep learning has improved prediction accuracy in PPM, most approaches follow a single-task learning (STL) setup, training a separate model per task. This increases maintenance effort and overlooks potential synergies. Multi-task learning (MTL), which jointly learns multiple prediction targets in one model, offers a promising alternative, yet its effectiveness in PPM remains underexplored. It remains unclear whether and under which settings MTL improves upon STL, which prediction tasks benefit most from joint learning, which task combinations are particularly synergistic, and if and how tasks should be balanced. To fill this gap, we present the first comprehensive empirical study of MTL for PPM, evaluating a variety of task combinations, neural architectures, and optimization methods. Overall, our results position MTL as a strong paradigm for PPM: we see substantial improvements in next-activity prediction and inherent mitigation of class imbalance using MTL, while task balancing is especially critical under low-capacity models.

Abstract: Predictive process monitoring aims at forecasting various aspects of running processes. Among the different tasks, next activity prediction represents the most extensively investigated. However, only a limited number of existing approaches explicitly encode contextual information, i.e., the environmental conditions in which the process is executed, typically modeled through event log attributes or aggregated measures. In this paper, an approach based on the concept of Instance Graphs is introduced. To incorporate contextual process instances, several encoding strategies are proposed and evaluated by measuring their impact on prediction performance. For each encoding strategy, a set of prefix-Instance Graphs is generated and subsequently provided as input to a Graph Neural Network for the classification task. The proposed approach is evaluated on multiple real-world event logs, and the experimental results demonstrate that incorporating contextual process instances benefits prediction performance.