Integration of Event Data from Heterogeneous Systems to Support Business Process Analysis

Business Intelligence (BI) systems have traditionally been warehouse based, and have not been sufficiently process-aware to support the needs of process improvement type activities. It has been a challenge to leverage BI (and increasingly Analytics) functionality within the context of an overall process model. The ability to drill down into process data, track specific chains of process events, perform what-if type analysis, as well as monitoring overall aggregate performance is where process-aware Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) systems can play a significant role in improving performance. This paper presents a system prototype with the capabilities of integrating event data flowing through different heterogeneous systems such as business process execution language (BPEL) engines, enterprises resource planning (ERP) systems, workflows, legacy systems, etc., as well as storing this data into a global process execution repository. A new language for querying the stored event information is presented.