Process science in action: A literature review on process mining in business management

Process Mining is a new kind of Business Analytics and has emerged as a powerful family of Process Science techniques for analysing and improving business processes. Although Process Mining has managerial benefits, such as better decision making, the scientific literature has investigated it mainly from a computer science standpoint and appears to have overlooked various possible applications. We reviewed management-orientated literature on Process Mining and Business Management to assess the state of the art and to pave the way for further research. We built a seven-dimension framework to develop and guide the review. We selected and analysed 145 papers and identified eleven research gaps sorted into four categories. Our findings were formalised in a structured research agenda suggesting twenty-five research questions. We believe that these questions may stimulate the application of Process Mining in promising, albeit little explored, business contexts and in mostly unaddressed managerial areas.