Failures of a Business Process in Enterprise Systems

A business process model typically describes a desired flow of events in an ideal environment. However, the reality tends to be more complicated than what is designed in the model. During the execution of business process instances, a lot of exceptions may occur. These exceptions are deviations from the correct, specified sequence of events. Thus it is important to know the behaviours of process instances in the presence of exceptions. The classical approach of incorporating exception analysis in process models has been trying to anticipate beforehand all possible exceptional conditions that might arise and argue the process model with those additional conditions in order to determine the exception handling actions. This approach, however, might be problematic because the identification of all possible exceptions relies on the experience and intuition of the participants.To have a clear understand of the failure behaviour of a business process is equal important, but first of all, it has to be studied what characteristics of failure often have. In this paper, we present the initial findings of our project that targets to the enterprise issues of healthcare systems.