Automated Business Process Analysis: An LLM-Based Approach to Value Assessment

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: De Michele, William, Cervantes, Abel Armas, Frermann, Lea
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author De Michele, William
Cervantes, Abel Armas
Frermann, Lea
author_facet De Michele, William
Cervantes, Abel Armas
Frermann, Lea
contents Business processes are fundamental to organizational operations, yet their optimization remains challenging due to the timeconsuming nature of manual process analysis. Our paper harnesses Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate value-added analysis, a qualitative process analysis technique that aims to identify steps in the process that do not deliver value. To date, this technique is predominantly manual, time-consuming, and subjective. Our method offers a more principled approach which operates in two phases: first, decomposing high-level activities into detailed steps to enable granular analysis, and second, performing a value-added analysis to classify each step according to Lean principles. This approach enables systematic identification of waste while maintaining the semantic understanding necessary for qualitative analysis. We develop our approach using 50 business process models, for which we collect and publish manual ground-truth labels. Our evaluation, comparing zero-shot baselines with more structured prompts reveals (a) a consistent benefit of structured prompting and (b) promising performance for both tasks. We discuss the potential for LLMs to augment human expertise in qualitative process analysis while reducing the time and subjectivity inherent in manual approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_06600
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Automated Business Process Analysis: An LLM-Based Approach to Value Assessment
De Michele, William
Cervantes, Abel Armas
Frermann, Lea
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Software Engineering
Business processes are fundamental to organizational operations, yet their optimization remains challenging due to the timeconsuming nature of manual process analysis. Our paper harnesses Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate value-added analysis, a qualitative process analysis technique that aims to identify steps in the process that do not deliver value. To date, this technique is predominantly manual, time-consuming, and subjective. Our method offers a more principled approach which operates in two phases: first, decomposing high-level activities into detailed steps to enable granular analysis, and second, performing a value-added analysis to classify each step according to Lean principles. This approach enables systematic identification of waste while maintaining the semantic understanding necessary for qualitative analysis. We develop our approach using 50 business process models, for which we collect and publish manual ground-truth labels. Our evaluation, comparing zero-shot baselines with more structured prompts reveals (a) a consistent benefit of structured prompting and (b) promising performance for both tasks. We discuss the potential for LLMs to augment human expertise in qualitative process analysis while reducing the time and subjectivity inherent in manual approaches.
title Automated Business Process Analysis: An LLM-Based Approach to Value Assessment
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06600