Statistical Issues in Describing Large Business Processes

Increasing emphasis on controlling and improving quality has been directed at business processes in recent years. Many methods and strategies have been developed to aid the practitioner. These methods and strategies generally feature a 'baseline the current process' step. Experience has shown this step to be extremely difficult, especially for large processes. In this paper, we first review relevant experiences in representing large business processes. We then describe generic factors that limit our ability to accurately describe and analyze processes.