Identifying and Classifying Variations in Business Processes

Many business processes exist not as singular entities but rather as a plurality of variants that need to be collectively managed. The spectrum of approaches for managing collections of process variants range from capturing all variants in a large consolidated model, down to capturing each variant as a separate model. Most of these approaches are built on the assumption that the variation points and variation drivers are given as input. The question of how process variation is elicited and conceptualized in the first place has received relatively little attention. As a step to filling this gap, this paper puts forward a framework for identifying and classifying variation drivers in business processes. We apply the framework on two collections of process models: one consisting of a collection of process models implicitly clustered along product type and the other one along market type. In both cases, the framework allowed us to identify and to classify additional variation drivers that were not evident from the initial clustering.