A three-layered method for business processes discovery and its application in manufacturing industry

Business process discovery is a basis for analyzing an enterprise's current business and is a critical key to enterprises seeking to be more process-centric today. Challenges in business process discovery include the complexity of the enterprise and the interactions among its units, the inaccuracy and incompleteness of available business information, and the dynamic changing businesses in the enterprise. In this paper, a three-layered architecture mixing the top–down and bottom–up methodology is proposed to address the above issues. Technical details of the three layers, namely the Component layer, the Operation Integration layer and the Operation layer are discussed. Moreover, a model checking based verification approach is also integrated in the method to verify the discovered business process against the desired business requirements from analysts. Finally, a case study in a furniture manufacturing enterprise in China is illustrated to prove the effectiveness of our method.