Leveraging ARIS Business Process Analysis and Process Mining for continuous process excellence

Leveraging ARIS Business Process Analysis and Process Mining for continuous process excellence

In today’s rapidly changing business landscape, organizations must continuously monitor and optimize their processes to remain competitive. ARIS offers a comprehensive cloud suite for process excellence that combines Business Process Analysis (BPA) and Process Mining (PM). These cloud tools, while powerful individually, deliver exceptional value when integrated – forming a closed loop of process modeling, execution monitoring, and continuous improvement.

Why use both ARIS Cloud tools together?

ARIS Business Process Analysis (BPA) is a strategic solution for designing, documenting, analyzing, and optimizing business processes. It provides a centralized platform to capture process knowledge, ensuring transparency and consistency across the organization. Key features include:

• Fast and intuitive process modeling (e.g., BPMN, EPC)
• Collaborative process design and publication
• Dashboards and KPI reporting
• Document management

ARIS BPA acts as the digital blueprint of your organization’s operating model – guiding teams in defining the ideal way of working.

ARIS Process Mining (PM) provides the analytical foundation to uncover how processes actually perform by analyzing data from operational systems (e.g., ERP, CRM). It reveals process execution paths, deviations, and root causes of inefficiencies using event-based data. Key capabilities include:

• Automated process discovery from event logs
• Process conformance and compliance checking
• Dashboards and actionable insights
• Root cause analysis and variant comparison

By providing an event-based view of process execution, ARIS PM empowers organizations to drive improvements.

Though different in focus, ARIS BPA and ARIS PM work together seamlessly as one ARIS Cloud solution, helping organizations design, analyze and improve processes, find bottlenecks, monitor performance, and making decisions based on real data.

Table 1.  Key features of ARIS BPA and ARIS PM

Integration and configuration features

To enable seamless collaboration between BPA and PM, you need to establish a technical integration using ARIS platform capabilities. The features of integration and configuration depend on the ARIS Cloud product edition that you are using (Basic, Advanced, Enterprise).

Necessary privileges you need to have for configuration:

• To connect ARIS BPA Basic/Advanced and ARIS PM:
  1. Project room management privilege in ARIS BPA
  2. User admin and Data admin function privileges in ARIS PM
• To connect ARIS BPA Enterprise and ARIS PM:
  1. User administrator and the Technical configuration administrator function privileges in ARIS BPA
  2. User admin and Data admin function privileges in ARIS PM

Integration for both systems is configured in Administration sections (Fig. 1).

Figure. 1. Administration section with ARIS integration features in ARIS PM and BPA

In the Administration section you can configure functions that you are going to use. For example, you can enable users to switch from ARIS BPA to the ARIS PM project room using the application launcher, transfer a BPMN model from ARIS BPA to ARIS PM for process conformance checking, transfer process variants from ARIS Process Mining to ARIS BPA (Fig. 2).

Figure. 2. Configurable integration settings

Once connected, the following functions become available:

• Bi-directional Navigation:
  • Open ARIS BPA directly from ARIS Process Mining
  • Open ARIS Process Mining from within ARIS BPA
• Model and Variant Exchange:
  • Transfer reference BPMN models from ARIS BPA to ARIS PM
  • Import discovered process variants from ARIS PM into ARIS BPA for further documentation
• User Management Integration:
  • Enable and configure the Identity Management Service in ARIS BPA and PM
  • Transfer users and groups from ARIS BPA to ARIS Process Mining
  • Assign user privileges in ARIS PM (note: transferred users and user groups will not have roles and privileges assigned by default)

How to use ARIS BPA and PM in tandem

1. Model your reference process in ARIS BPA

• Use BPMN notation to define end-to-end process flows.
• You need to model activities, gates and connections between them.
• This model becomes the reference process for further transferring and analysis (Fig. 3).

Figure. 3. BPMN model of business process in ARIS BPA

2. Discover the actual process in ARIS Process Mining

• Connect to ERP or other systems and extract event logs or prepare CSV file with them.
• Upload event logs into the ARIS PM dataset and connect it to the project.
• Use Process discovery to visualize the real-life execution path based on the event logs in the project.
• Identify bottlenecks, rework loops, and deviations using Process explorer application (Fig. 4).

Figure. 4. Event-based process discovered in ARIS Process Mining

3. Perform process compliance and conformance analysis

• Transfer the reference BPMN model from ARIS BPA to ARIS PM.
• Run Process compliance to compare the reference BPMN process and event-based process.
• Identify mismatches, root causes of deviations, and non-compliance areas (Fig. 5).

Figure. 5. Transferring BPMN process to ARIS PM and running Process Compliance

4. Enrich and update your process model in ARIS BPA

• Use insights from Process Mining and analyze process variants to improve the process model.
• Transfer relevant process variants from ARIS PM to ARIS BPA repository to create or enrich BPMN model for further reporting and using as a new reference model (Fig. 6).

Figure. 6. Transferring process variants from ARIS PM to ARIS BPA

Conclusion

By combining ARIS BPA’s design power with ARIS Process Mining’s analytical strength, organizations can close the gap between ideal process and its real execution. Both cloud tools form a closed-loop process management cycle. This integration not only boosts operational transparency but also enables agile, data-driven decision making and sustainable process excellence.

If you have any questions or you need demonstrations of ARIS capabilities, please, contact us by the contact form and we provide you with more information.