Visual ppinot: A Graphical Notation for Process Performance Indicators

Process performance indicators (PPIs) allow the quantitative evaluation of business processes, providing essential information for decision making. It is common practice today that business processes and PPIs are usually modelled separately using graphical notations for the former and natural language for the latter. This approach makes PPI definitions simple to read and write, but it hinders maintenance consistency between business processes and PPIs. It also requires their manual translation into lower-level implementation languages for their operationalisation, which is a time-consuming, error-prone task because of the ambiguities inherent to natural language definitions. In this article, Visual ppinot, a graphical notation for defining PPIs together with business process models, is presented. Its underlying formal metamodel allows the automated processing of PPIs. Furthermore, it improves current state-of-the-art proposals in terms of expressiveness and in terms of providing an explicit visualisation of the link between PPIs and business processes, which avoids inconsistencies and promotes their co-evolution. The reference implementation, developed as a complete tool suite, has allowed its validation in a multiple-case study, in which five dimensions of Visual ppinot were studied: expressiveness, precision, automation, understandability, and traceability.