Version 9.5.2

Release Date: March, 2024

Improvements and Bug Fixes

ETL

• Fix: When a Parquet and CSV file are extracted using S3 connector and merged using the Append operation, an unclear error message is displayed. Now, the logs are appended without errors.

• Fix: When a user has a username of 45 characters (max character length), and the user schedules a pipeline, the pipeline either fails to save or cannot be scheduled. Now, the pipeline can be saved or scheduled when the username has 45 characters.

• Fix: When a user extracts a log via the workspace connector in the ETL pipeline, the extraction steps fail due to a possible mismatch in the timestamps. Now, the user can extract the log successfully.

Others

• Fix: There was an error when the user clicks the “Manage access right” icon in Portal. Now, the user can open the “Manage access right” without errors.

• Fix: When a dashboard template with sliced tiles is reapplied to the same log, the tiles appear without the slice setting. Now, when a dashboard template is applied on the same log, the tiles contain the initial configured slice setting.

• Fix: When viewing the case timeline, the last activity appears as a number when the activity name is long. Now, the case timeline displays the actual name of the activity.

• Fix: When a user shares a log containing a KPI and the shared user attempts to delete the KPI, the KPI is deleted for the shared user but remains available for the owner of the log.

• Fix: When the dashboard is configured to display a case attribute chart, the chart may display no data. Now the dashboard displays the case attribute chart accurately.

• Fix: When a directly-follow path filter is applied, the filter results may be inaccurate. Now, the filter displays the accurate result in the process.

• Fix: When performing root cause analysis, values of timestamp attributes appear in human readable format and no longer in UNIX format.

• Fix: The dates of the public holiday were slightly inaccurate due to timezone difference. Now, the dates are displayed accurately and the user can make edits to the dates of holiday(s).

• Fix: When a filter containing multiple filter types including a block filter is saved and loaded, the result of the loaded filter is incorrect. Now, the loaded filter displays the accurate result of the filter criteria.

• Fix: When a log that has an existing mapping schema is uploaded, the prompt asking the user to accept the schema or not is unresponsive if the log had invalid rows. Now, the user can select whether or not to accept the existing mapping schema and proceed with the log upload.

• Fix: The KPI result sometimes returned different results from when the same filter was applied through the Filter log window. Now, the result of the KPI result is the same with the filter result if the same filter was created.

• Fix: When the position of tiles and gauges are relocated in a dashboard, and the dashboard is saved and loaded, the tiles and gauges were not found in the new location. Now, the tiles and gauges appear in the locations they were moved to.

• Fix: When two BPMN models are compared and the difference involves the use of a different task type, the BPMN comparator displayed inaccurate result. Now, the BPMN comparator displays the exact changes that were made.

• Improvement: When creating a PAAR draft, all qualifiers and benefits were disabled by default and the sliders extremes’ labels were strings with keywords. Now, the qualifiers and benefits are enabled by default and the labels show the correct numerical value.

Version 9.5.1

Release Date: February, 2024

Features

S3 Connector Enhancements for Micro-Batch Ingestion

Micro-batch ingestion is a method where data is ingested in small, manageable batches, instead of being ingested in a single, large batch.

The Apromore S3 Connector now supports micro-batch ingestion. In the S3 Connector, a micro-batch is a file containing a (relatively) small number of rows. When adding a new table to a pipeline using the S3 connector, we can specify that this table must be ingested in micro-batches, instead of it being ingested in a single go, from one single file.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

Process Discoverer

• Improvement: The layout dropdown in Process Discoverer toolbar has been moved to its original place (before the zoom icons).

• Improvement: After selecting a layout option from the layout dropdown, the dropdown stays open as though a selection was not made. Now, the dropdown closes after a layout option is selected.

• Improvement: The share icon in Process Discoverer toolbar has been relocated after the KPI icon.

• Fix: Password management application sometimes autofill the search bar in Process Discoverer sometimes redirects the user to the documentation. Now, password management applications no longer populate the search bar in Process Discoverer.

• Fix: When a user changes the schema of a scheduled ETL pipeline, the next pipeline run now fails and informs the user that they cannot perform an operation on a log whose schema has changed.

Others

• Fix: When the user enters a KPI name that is more than 100 characters, an error message is no longer displayed. Rather, a warning message informs the user that a KPI name cannot exceed 100 characters.

• Fix: When an Approver shares a model with another user, the Approver may sometimes not view the model from their notification center. Now, the Approver can view the model from their notification center.

• Fix: When a user shares a process model that has a subprocess, the shared user could not access the subprocess in the model. Now, the shared user can access the subprocess in the model.

• Fix: When a user publishes a model and selects an approver, sometimes the approver does not see the model in their notification window. Now, the approver sees the sharing request and can approve or reject it.

• Fix: Sometimes, the “Filter by case cost” feature displays an infinite loading spinner when it does not have the required data for the operation. Now, the “Filter by case cost” button is disabled when it does not have the data to filter a log by case cost.

• Fix: When an ETL pipeline is created from three sources and the “Generate a new log every time the pipeline is executed” loading strategy is selected, the pipeline run fails. Now, the pipeline runs successfully in these conditions.

• Fix: When a dashboard template that is not fully compatible is loaded, the dashboard returns blank widgets. Now, the dashboard returns the widgets with a message “No data to display”.

• Fix: The rework filter fails to select any cases where the activity name had a single quotation mark. Now, single quotation marks in activity names do not affect the rework filter functionality.

• Fix: The swimlane descriptions were not aligned and was overlapping with the lane. Now, this alignment issue has been fixed.

Version 9.5

Release Date: January, 2024

Features

Blocks Filters

The Blocks Filter is a new type of filter that allows us to create filters consisting of multiple conditions, in an intuitive manner. We can create multiple filter conditions in one go by dragging and dropping filter blocks.

Multiple block rows are concatenated by an “AND” logical operator or an “OR” logical operator. If the “AND” logical operator is selected, then the Blocks filter criterion is fulfilled if every one of its conditions is true. If the “OR” operator is selected, the Blocks filter criterion is fulfilled if at least one of its conditions is true. To learn more, see Blocks filter.

Process Discoverer Enhancements

Process Map Layout in Process Discoverer

To better understand a process map, displaying the most frequent activities along a horizontal line may be useful. In Apromore 9.5, we can horizontally align and lock the most frequent activities in one specific Y-coordinates (called the backbone line) when displaying the process map.

There are three layout options when configuring the process map layout in Process Discoverer: legacy left-to-right, auto-discovered backbone and user-defined backbone. To learn more, see Process map layout.

Activity Inspector in Process Discoverer

In business process mining, it is useful for stakeholders to have a detailed understanding of each transition between consecutive activities in a process to enhance operational efficiency and decision making. To analyze the activity transitions in detail, we need to have a way to investigate each incoming and each outgoing arc of an activity.

In Apromore 9.5, when we double-click an activity in Process Discover, the Activity Inspector now displays the activities that directly follow and the activities that directly precede the selected activity, as well as relevant metrics: relative frequency, average frequency and average duration. To learn more, see Inspect activities.

Dashboard Enhancements

Work-in-Progress (Activity Queue) Chart

For business monitoring purposes, managers may be interested in knowing the number of cases where an activity is in Activity queue or the number of activity completion over a period of time. This may be useful for planning resource allocation or expected turnover rate.

In the dashboard, we can have the Work-in-Progress (Activity Queue) chart that displays the work-in-progress per activity or the activity throughput over a period of time. To learn more, see Work-in-Progress (Activity Queue).

Multiple Y-axis in Performance Trend Charts

When creating a performance trend chart, it is often necessary to display multiple performance metrics simultaneously over a period of time. This allows us to see how these metrics evolve together.

In Apromore 9.5, we can add multiple Y-axis in a performance trend chart. For instance, we can have a primary Y-axis that displays the average case duration over a period and, in the same chart, a secondary Y-axis that displays the waiting time over the time period. We can add up to two additional Y-axis (called secondary Y-axis). To learn more, see Performance trend chart.

User Management Enhancements

As admins or superusers, we can now see all the files (i.e., folders, logs, or models) that a specific user within our tenancy has access to and can edit those access rights. To learn more, see see Manage access rights.

KPI Enhancements

Root Cause Analysis

The root-cause analysis feature is now able to discover complex conditions, consisting of more than one predicate, such as: Country = “Germany” and InvoiceAmount > 5000 and ProductType = “Machinery”. This helps us understand specific contributing factors to the KPI violations. To learn more, see Perform root cause analysis.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

Process Discoverer

• Improvement: When the user removes the value from the text box in the abstraction slider and applies an empty text box (by clicking on any empty place in Process Discoverer, or pressing “Enter“), the value is auto filled as 0 and 0 is displayed in the textbox. The slider is also saved as 0 and is moved to the left corner.

• Improvement: When the user selects the “Total Rework“ dimension for the “Frequency“ or “Duration“ overlay, the rework metric is displayed for each transition.

• Improvement: The Case Inspector now contains the start and the end timestamp in addition to the Case ID, activity instances, duration, and cost as in previous versions.

• Improvement: The user is now able to download the data from the Case Inspector. For larger logs with more than 100000 cases, the user can download the first 100000 cases from the Case Inspector.

• Improvement: When a case is selected in the case inspector, and the user hover over an activity in Process Discoverer, the user can see the start and end timestamps in the format “dd MM yyyy HH:mm:ss“.

• Fix: The duplication of NULL value in the filter log window is now fixed.

• Fix: The toolbars in Process Discoverer window is disabled when user has another window opened.

• Fix: When a cost center has been applied to a log and a filtered log is saved, the filtered log also saves the cost values.

• Fix: When an uncommon currency is used in Process Discoverer, the user sometimes gets a “Filter response error” when applying a filter. This issue has been fixed.

BPMN Editor

• Improvement: The BPMN Editor now displays the description of the specific model.

• Improvement: There is now a “Publication history” icon that allows the user to view the history of all the published/unpublished versions of the model.

• Improvement: The labels entered on a task/event in the BPMN Editor is now center-aligned by default and not left-aligned.

• Improvement: When the user edits the texts in the following BPMN element: “Arc description”, “Gateway description”, “Start/End/Intermediate event name” and “Data objects description”, the font size does not change but remains the same during rendering.

• Improvement: When saving a BPMN model in the BPMN Editor, the “Autosave” label is now changed to “Auto backup (local draft)”.

• Fix: When a user changes the font size of a model, all the elements are resized to the specified font size. If the user adds a new element (e.g. a task), the font size of this new task is still the font size the user specified.

• Fix: Task names are aligned and appear within the frame when the BPMN model is downloaded as PNG, SVG or PDF.

• Fix: In some situations, the BPMN comparator says an activity was changed when no change was made. Now, the BPMN comparator shows the exact changes made when comparing two models.

• Fix: The BPMN Editor now successfully opens a model discovered from a log with simulation parameters when the log contains over 200 role values.

• Fix: When editing a task in the BPMN Editor, the font size while typing no longer appear small but maintain the same font size as other tasks in the model.

• Fix: When the user deselects “Show attachment labels”, the icons and labels no longer disappear as they are attachments and not the attachment labels.

• Fix: When saving a BPMN model from a log with “.” before the file extension, the BPMN model maintains the name of the log while only changing its extension.

Dashboard

• Improvement: When selecting 3D charts (eg, heatmap, tree map, or bubble charts), the data points column is replaced with a “Total frequency” column. The Total frequency column shows the total frequency of the attribute. The chart also shows the top 20 most frequent attributes by default.

• Fix: The dashboard now shows the updated charts after a filter is applied to a cloned chart.

• Fix: Consecutive-pairs heatmap now displays consistent values when only one X-axis value is selected.

• Fix: When a chart block is moved in a dashboard, no empty space is created. Only the moved block changes its position, and all other blocks remain in their original locations.

• Fix: The dashboard no longer has missing fields in the presentation section when a tile with case attribute is created, the selected attribute has real numbers, and the display type is “Sum (inter-cases)”.

• Fix: When a dashboard template is loaded, heatmap charts with same X and Y attributes are loaded successfully.

• Fix: When a dashboard template containing a table with an applied filter is loaded to another dashboard, the filter remains applied to the table.

• Fix: When a dashboard with incompatible log slicing rules or incompatible log filtering rule is imported, the dashboard does not show blank widgets but present empty results.

• Fix: After slicing a block (chart, tile, table) using the resource attribute, filters applied to the block are successfully reflected in the displayed data.

• Fix: When user opens attribute value window after changing an attribute (case or event), the user sees the updated values in the attribute value window.

• Fix: Fixed an issue in the dashboard where “Others” appears twice in a pie chart, depending on the log.

• Fix: When the user clicks the “Relative” scale of a duration chart, and hovers their mouse on a data point, the % symbol appears which was not present before.

• Fix: The X and Y-axis values of a timestamp-based attribute values are displayed in the dd.mm.yyyy hh:mm:ss format instead of the simple epoch millisecond values.

• Fix: When the user creates a predicted case attributes using the predictor, the user is now able to create charts based on the predictor case attributes.

• Fix: When the user creates a chart with numerical attributes on X-axis and a Resource as an Event attribute on Y-axis, the Y-axis now accurately displays the resource names. Prior to now, the resource names were not displayed correctly on the Y-axis.

• Fix: When creating a performance trend chart, the variability ratio now accurately displays the ratio between variants and cases.

• Fix: When a chart is created where the value of the X-axis attribute has long characters, the user sees an abridged X-axis attribute with ellipses (…) ensuring the X-axis attribute text do not overlap.

• Fix: The issue where scatterplots in a dashboard were not displayed when the user downloads the dashboard in DOCX or PPTX format has been fixed.

• Fix: The bug that replaced spaces in a log name with ‘n’ when uploading a filter template from the dashboard has been fixed.

• Fix: The bug that replaced spaces in a log name with ‘n’ when editing the name of a filter applied on a dashboard block has been fixed.

• Fix: When a user creates a heatmap chart and selects the X and Y-axis attribute, the user now sees the selected X and Y axis attribute values in the chart even if the combination (“X1”, “Y1”) and (“X1”, “Y2”) did not occur in the log.

• Fix: When a performance trend chart (custom) is created, the time unit on the Y-axis is now automatically set depending on the data rather than it being in milliseconds.

• Fix: When adding the reference line/KPI threshold of a performance trend chart, the values are no longer in milliseconds but rather are in the same unit as in the chart.

• Fix: Before now, the user could not add an X-Axis reference line after creating a performance trend chart. This bug is now fixed, and the user can add an X-axis reference lines to a performance trend chart.

• Fix: When a user adds a Y-axis reference line to a performance trend chart and then changes the Y-axis metric, the Y-axis reference line could not be modified. This issue has been fixed and the user can now change the Y-axis metric at any time.

• Fix: Fixed an issue where loading a saved filter template with both Filter and Slicing criteria did not apply these settings to tables or charts in dashboards. Now, tables and charts correctly reflect the slicing and filter criteria from saved templates.

• Fix: Prior to now, when creating a performance trend chart, empty buckets may be displayed at the start of the time frame (X-axis), making the chart less appealing. Now, the performance trend chart starts from the first non-empty bucket.

Log Importer

• Improvement: When importing a log in the workspace, cells in the Log importer are center aligned, the columns names for the timestamp column have tidy alignment and there is more spacing between rows.

• Fix: When an event log is exported, the columns tagged as event attribute perspective displays the original column names and not the base32 encoded names.

• Fix: Users can now import timestamps with extra digits in the micro-seconds section, i.e., with the format yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSSSSS.

• Fix: The user can now successfully import a log with up to 2000 role values.

ETL Pipeline

• Improvement: When selecting an S3 bucket to extract in an ETL pipeline, the “Browse” button has been changed to the folder icon.

• Improvement: When there are more than 100 runs of a schedules pipeline, then the latest 100 runs of the pipelines are displayed.

• Fix: Fixed issue with a scheduled ETL pipeline failing when the pipeline uses a workspace connector sourced from a delta log.

• Fix: Before now, when the user uploads a log extracted from the workspace connector, only 50 rows are uploaded each time. The user can now fully import the events when logs are extracted using the workspace log. This extracted log can also be uploaded in full using the Upload button and schedule pipeline in ETL.

• Fix: Fixed issue with importing logs where rows with integers greater than 4,294,967,296 fails.

• Fix: When a chained pipeline is built using S3 connector, the chained pipeline no longer appears empty when the preview icon is clicked.

• Fix: Fixed issue with the user sometimes getting the “Oops… something unexpected happened” error message after an ETL pipeline was successfully scheduled.

• Fix: In the transform step of an ETL pipeline, the user no longer gets NULL values when there are three timestamp columns.

• Fix: The ETL screen does not freeze when removing a log that’s being used in the merge step.

• Fix: The ETL screen does not freeze when attempting to upload more than 10 files at once including zip files but rather warn the user that a maximum of 10 files can be uploaded at a time using local file upload.

• Fix: Log import no longer fails with usernames having characters dot “.” or underscore “_” or file names that have “.”

• Fix: The user can now perform undo/redo in the ETL pipeline without errors.

• Fix: When an extracted log is deleted in the workspace, the user now sees a clear error message stating that one or more extracted workspace logs have been deleted and that a new log should be extracted.

Filters

• Fix: The two NULL values that show up when performing an attribute filter has been fixed. Now only one NULL value can appear.

• Fix: When creating an event-based timeframe filter, and the log-scale is selected, the data points in the chart do not appear as blank out anymore.

• Fix: Fixed issue with the case variant filter occasionally returning inconsistent values.

• Fix: The “Filter by case cost” button is disabled if the log does not have the necessary data to support this operation.

• Fix: Before now, when accessing the “Load filter templates” window via Portal or Process Discoverer, the action icons (rename and delete) appeared cropped. Now, they appear fully.

• Fix: When saving a filtered log, a 100-character limit has been introduced. The label is updated to “Enter a log name (no more than 100 chars)”.

• Fix: When a user undoes multiple quick filters in the dashboard, each “Undo“ clicks represent each filter that was applied.

• Fix: The user can now perform range selection on an attribute filter with negative numerical values.

• Fix: When a calendar that has been added to a log is removed, the result of any previously applied filter is now updated if the filter is dependent on the calendar values.

• Fix: Fixed issue with users occasionally not being able enter spaces in filter descriptions.

• Fix: Fixed issue with the user no longer able to use the filter sliders to select a timeframe after toggling the “Relative timeframes” on and off in the Timeframe filter.

• Fix: Fixed an inconsistency in Process Discoverer where removing a previously applied calendar caused mismatched filter results between the log statistics section and the filter window. Now, filter results are consistent, regardless of calendar changes.

KPIs

• Improvement: When the KPI name is up to 200 characters, the user gets a warning stating that the KPI name should not be longer.

• Improvement: When there are no violations found during root cause analysis, the KPI center displays information stating no root cause was found rather than displaying an error message.

• Improvement: The KPI title displays the KPI stats without any imperfections regardless of the size of log.

• Fix: When the KPI window is opened, the user is no longer able to interact with other content in the background.

• Fix: When the user updates the cost center information or calendar information of a log, KPIs attached to the log reflects the updated values.

• Fix: The KPI center now reflects the updated currency when the currency in the cost center is changed.

• Fix: Fixed issue with the KPI returning NullPointerException for some logs when the KPI target was set to <= a value.

• Fix: Fixed issue with the user getting an empty zip file when downloading a KPI due to the presence of special characters (/, \, |, :, *, ?, “, <, >) in the KPI name.

Others

• Improvement: Users can use special characters when entering an artifact description.

• Improvement: When the user creates a new user in the “User Management” window, the new “Role” dropdown is added that allows the user to assign the needed role at the point of creating the new user.

• Fix: Empty user logins is not shown in Activity history if there is a redirection error during log in.

• Fix: Fixed issue with some model versions appearing to be already published (according to icon labels), however, when the user clicks on such icons, the publishing window open - yet they cannot proceed with the publication process.

• Fix: When a log with an applied calendar is shared to another user, the applied calendar is visible to the shared user from the Cost center window.

• Fix: When a calendar that is applied to a role is deleted, the user was not able to make any further in the cost center. This has been fixed.

• Fix: When the user changes the interarrival time in the simulation parameters to the same value changes, the values (although unchanged) is changed in the backend. This issue has been fixed.

• Fix: Fixed issue with the red (removed) elements appearing smaller than the green (added) elements during conformance checking of a BPMN model.

• Fix: During conformance checking, the arcs are now displayed to begin and end on the edge of the task, event or gateway frame.

Version 9.4

Release Date: October, 2023

Features

Performance Trend Charts

When analyzing a business process, it is useful to understand how certain process performance metrics change over time. This helps in detecting performance improvements or degradations.

You can now create a performance trend chart which displays how a performance metric evolves. An example of a performance trend chart is a chart that displays the “average case duration over time” or the “active cases over time”.

For more information, see Performance trend chart.

Simulation Enhancements

Resource Performance Handicap

Sometimes, a resource may take longer to complete an activity than the assigned activity duration. For instance, assume we have two roles, “Junior Financial Manager” and “Financial Manager”. Both roles can perform the same tasks (e.g., “Pay invoice”, “Release supplier’s invoice”, etc.). However, the resources with the “Junior” role are 10% slower due to their lack of experience. To capture this difference, you can add a 10% “performance handicap” to the Junior Financial Manager role.

For more information, see Resource performance handicap.

Resource Maximum Allowed Overtime

When we simulate a process model, a resource may sometimes begin an activity instance just before their work shift completes, in such a way that the resource is unable to complete the activity instance within their current shift.

For instance, consider the following example. Mark (a Purchasing Agent) starts the “Analyze Request for Quotation” activity, which takes 30 minutes at 4:40 pm. But his shift ends at 5:00 pm, so he does not complete the activity in the current shift. The following day, Mark continues the activity execution and completes it in 10 minutes (at 9:10 am). In other words, the default behavior of the simulator is to interrupt an activity instance at the end of a shift, and to resume it at the beginning of the next shift (e.g., the next work-day).

When faced with such situations in reality, a resource may opt to do a 10-minute overtime to complete the task instead of postponing its completion to the next working day.

In Apromore 9.4, you can now capture this behavior by assigning a “maximum allowed overtime” to a role. In the above example, if the Purchase Agent role has a maximum allowed overtime of 10 minutes or more, the simulator will consider that Mark will use the overtime to complete the above activity instance within the same work shift where it started.

For more information, see Resource maximum allowed overtime.

Event attributes in simulation parameters

In previous versions of Apromore, only case attributes were supported by the simulator. In Apromore 9.4, you can attach attributes to a simulation scenario. These attributes may behave as case attributes or as event attributes, depending on whether they are modified by one or more tasks (event attributes), or they are never modified (case attributes).

For more information, see Attributes.

BPMN Editor Enhancements

Show or hide comments, attachments and attachment labels

You can now show or hide comments, attachments, and attachment labels in the BPMN Editor.

Resize attachments with associated tasks

When an attachment is added to a task, you can now resize the attachment in the BPMN Editor.

Process Modeling Enhancements

Compare two versions of a process model

You can now compare two versions of the same BPMN model to highlight the differences between these versions.

Dashboards Enhancements

Handover statistics in the Dashboard

During performance monitoring, managers may need to understand how efficiently tasks are transferred from one resource, role, or team to the other. You can now visualize the handover statistics in a dashboard tile.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

ETL

• Improvement: An error message is produced if an ETL pipeline generates an excessive number of records (more than five times the maximum number of records allowed in one import). This typically happens when a join operation uses an incorrect key.

• Improvement: A warning message is displayed when a connected pipeline changes.

• Improvement: In the “Data pipeline management“ window, when a pipeline run has “failed“, the reason for the failure is displayed when you hover over the “Failed” status tag.

• Improvement: Error messages when a pipeline fails now include hints on how to fix the error.

• Improvement: When an event log is extracted via the Workspace connector, the timestamp columns are displayed in standardized ISO-8601 format with a timezone indicator, e.g., 2020-05-31T23:10:01.000+10:00. These standardized timestamps make it simpler to perform date operations (e.g., extract the year and month of a timestamp column).

• Improvement: When configuring a pipeline with a loading strategy of “always append data to the same log” or “Overwrite the log every time the pipeline is executed,” there is now an option to choose whether or not a new log should be generated when the schema of the pipeline is altered, to prevent schema incompatibility issues.

• Improvement: When uploading a log via a data pipeline, an error message is displayed if two columns have identical names or if one column is named “Activity” and a different column is tagged as the “Activity” column (or same for “Resource” or “Role”).

• Improvement: A warning message is displayed when a chained pipeline changes its output.

• Improvement: In the “Data pipeline management“ window, when a pipeline run has “failed“, the reason for the failure is displayed when hovering over the “Failed” status tag. The message includes hints on how to fix the error.

• Improvement: When configuring a pipeline with a loading strategy of “always append data to the same log” or “Overwrite the log every time the pipeline is executed,” there is now an option to choose whether or not a new log should be generated when the schema of the pipeline is altered, toprevent schema incompatibility issues.

• Improvement: An error message is produced if an ETL pipeline generates an excessive number of records when importing a log. This typically happens when a join operation uses an incorrect key.

• Improvement: Added a confirmation message before deleting a pipeline.

• Fix: In the ETL module, it is now possible to import CSV files that contain fields wrapped between “double quotation marks.”

• Fix: Replace log from the local file upload option in the Extract step has been fixed and improved.

• Fix: ETL no longer crashes when deleting logs from existing pipelines or rescheduling.

• Fix: Column rules are more fault tolerant when creating rules with incompatible data types.

• Fix: Resolved issues with shared users editing and viewing pipeline destination folders

• Fix: Pipelines can now be shared with empty groups.

• Fix: Column labels in the load tab are now reloaded when editing pipelines.

• Fix: Deleted columns are now immediately removed from the Transform table.

Log and Model Importer

• Fix: Error message “Multi part upload End of File” failure when uploading large uncompressed CSV files.

• Improvement: It is now possible to import CSV files in the ETL Load step that contain fields that are wrapped within double quotation marks.

• Improvement: When importing a log via the Portal, it is now possible to rename the columns, for example, to avoid a name clash. Note that you cannot rename case ID, start time, activity, resource, and role.

• Fix: When there are duplicate column names, the column name can be changed in the Log importer.

• Fix: Apromore now enforces a maximum number of rows per role, which depends on your tenancy. If there are more roles than the maximum, a warning is displayed, and the Importer only imports up to the maximum allowed rows.

• Fix: BPMN models and logs in the Apromore Workspace are properly sorted. You can also sort the files in either ascending or descending order.

Dashboard

• Improvement: Performance improvements in dashboards with multiple filters.

• Fix: When viewing a dashboard from the Portal, the Portal correctly displays a list of saved Dashboard to choose from.

Simulation

• Improvement: When you save a BPMN with simulation parameters, the information about the roles in the event in the log, if available, is also included in the simulation parameters.

• Improvement: When specifying the maximum branching probability error, an info icon informs you that in the simulation results, the gateway branching probabilities will not deviate more than the specified value.

• Improvement: The “download simulation scenario” icon/button is now relocated to the “Download” dropdown menu.

Process Discoverer

• Improvement: When you hover the mouse over any log statistics sections in the top panel in Process Discoverer, you will see the 1st and 3rd quartiles for the duration and cost statistics.

• Improvement: The case inspector now displays the cost, and the case variant inspector now displays the average cost.

• Improvement: When you select a specific case in the case variant inspector and hovers their mouse on the start event, you can see the three most frequent values of every case attribute.

Others

• Improvement: When saving or editing filters, filter templates, and dashboards, you can now add or edit a description.

• Fix: When you enter a comment or the name of an activity with multiple lines in the BPMN Editor, each line wraps with a complete word if the word is less than the maximum box width.

• Improvement: When an event that can be linked to a subprocess is selected, if you hover with the pointer over it, the pointer turns into the “selection hand”. If you do a second left-click (not a double-click), the window to link a process model appears, allowing you to link an event to a subprocess

• Fix: The log name on the Activity History page matches the correct log name.

Version 9.3

Release Date: June, 2023

Features

Root Cause Analysis

As a process manager or analyst, when a KPI target is not met, we need to understand which cases are more likely to violate the KPI. This information can help us to identify KPI violation causes and corrective actions.

In Apromore 9.4 you can now perform a root cause analysis to help in such investigations. The Root Cause Analyzer in the KPI Center displays a list of conditions under which the risk of KPI violation is considerably higher when this condition holds compared to when the condition does not hold. For more information, see Perform root cause analysis.

Automation Assessment

You can now generate a Process Automation Assessment Report (PAAR) which provides a summary of the benefits of automating one or more activities in a process. This helps you assess the time and cost improvements of automating one or more activities in a process. For example, the PAAR can indicate how the resource cost will change when a resource or group of resource is replaced by a bot. The auto generated PAAR contains the following:

• Changes to the resource cost.

• Changes to the average task duration.

• Changes to the average task cost.

• Changes to the average frequency per month.

After generating a Process Automation Assessment Report (PAAR), it is now possible to send the data in the report to a MuleSoft RPA Manager for technical assessment. The URL and credentials of a MuleSoft tenancy need to be provided to do so.

For more information, see Generate PAAR Draft.

Rework Metrics

Apromore 9.3 supports the use of rework metrics in the Process Discoverer, and in the Dashboard. The rework metrics helps to identify the effect of rework in a business process. The following rework metrics are supported:

• Total rework: Total number of times an activity has been repeated after having been executed once in a case.

• Rework duration: Total duration of the reworked activity instances.

• Rework cost: Total cost of the reworked activity instances.

In Process Discoverer, you can now display the total rework for each task, the total rework cost for each task and the total duration a resource spends on the rework.

In Dashboard, you can now display a chart in showing the rework metrics on the Y-axis against any activity attribute on the X-axis. For example, you can now create a column chart showing the average rework cost for every activity in the business process.

For more information, see Event attribute chart.

First Touch Metrics

In a customer-facing process, touchpoint activities affect the customer experience, as well as several business process metrics, such as the case duration. Apromore 9.3 now supports first touch metrics which is used to analyze the performance of the resources that perform the first touchpoint activity in each case (the first-touch activity). For example, in a complaints handling process, it is useful to analyze the durations of cases depending on which resource performed the first-touch activity in a case (the first-touch resource).

You can now display several performance statistics for each first-touch resource and first-touch activity in Apromore 9.3. This is achieved by adding a first-touch statistics table in a custom dashboard.

For more information, see First touch (FT) statistics table.

Custom Predictive Dashboards

You can now create custom predictive dashboards in Apromore. Predictive dashboards enables business stakeholders to visualize the predicted performance of a process in the near term (e.g., in the next 3-5 days).

For example, you can configure a chart in a custom dashboard to display the number of cases that will end up with a negative outcome, per country or per type of customer. Next to this chart, you can add other custom charts to display the same information for the recent past (e.g., last week) to allow managers to compare the recent performance with the predicted performance.

You can use predictive attributes in a dashboard or in filters. When used in a dashboard, you can create a chart that displays the predicted attribute against any other case attributes. For example, a heat map showing the predicted accepted cases for each channel. When used in Filter, you can filter the log based on the values in the predicted attribute. For example, you can filter cases where the predicted attribute is “Yes” or “No”.

For more information, see Use predictions in dashboards and filters.

Start Times Estimation

When importing an event log that contains end times but not start times, Apromore now provides the option of estimating the start times of every activity in an event log, given the end times. The start time is calculated from the end time attribute and the resource attribute when importing an event log.

For more information, see Start Times Estimation.

Model Publication Approval

You can now add requester and approval groups in Apromore. This is useful when publishing a model in Apromore. When a user in a Requester group requests to publish a model, the request must first be approved by a member of a corresponding Approvers group.

The approver can either approve or decline the publication of the model. Apromore also allows for two levels of Approvers (Level 1 and Level 2). A model is only published when Level 1 and Level 2 Approvers approve the publication request. If Level 2 Approver was not created, the model is published when the Level 1 Approval approves the request.

However, when a user is not assigned to a group of Requesters or is assigned to a group of Requesters that is not related to the user’s group of Approvers, the user is able to publish process model versions without approval.

For more information, see Publish Process Model.

Process Discoverer Enhancements

Discovery of Probability Distributions in Simulation Models

In the Process Discoverer, when a BPMN model is saved with simulation parameters, each activity in the model is assigned a probability distribution (normal, exponential, fixed, or uniform) depending on the distribution of activity durations in the event log. (Previously, all activities were assigned the default exponential distribution).

Discovery of Case Attributes and Their Probability Distributions

In the Process Discoverer, when a BPMN model is saved with simulation parameters, the case attributes of the event log are also saved in the simulation scenario. For each case attribute, the simulation scenario will contain its data type (String, Integer, Real, Timestamp) and its probability distribution (normal, exponential, uniform, fixed).

Log Filter Enhancements

Percentile Performance Filter

You can now filter based on a percentile over a performance metric in the performance filter. For example, you can retrieve all cases in the top-10th percentile of case duration. In other words, the top 10% fastest cases.

ETL Enhancements

Pipeline sharing

Apromore 9.3 now allows you to share an ETL pipeline with other users or groups, such that these users or groups can view, edit or own the shared ETL pipeline.

Other Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improvement: If an ETL pipeline takes one single CSV file as input, and two events in the imported file have identical case ID, start time, and end time, the tie-break is resolved by preserving the original order of these rows in the imported CSV file. This behavior is consistent with the behavior of the log importer in the Portal.

• Improvement: In the transform step of an ETL pipeline, a user is able to undo/redo operations that create, rename, or delete a column, as well as operations to add or edit rules.

• Improvement: In the Transform view of an ETL pipeline, there is a delete button next to each column. When a column that has an associated rules is deleted, a warning message is given to prevent the user from inadvertendly losing these rule(s).

• Improvement: Compressed event logs can be imported via the S3 connector (in zip or gz formats).

• Improvement: A warning pop-up window is displayed when a user moves a folder or file to a new location and this movement would cause a change in the access rights of the folder or file.

• Improvement: A warning pop-up window is displayed when a session is about to expire, and the user is given the option to extend the session. A session timeout counter is displayed in the pop-up window.

• Improvement: When a filtered log is saved in Process Discoverer or Dashboard, a short textual description can be added. This description can be viewed in the Details section in the Portal. Users with editor or owner right can edit the description associated to a log.

• Improvement: When a new process model (version) is saved, a short description can be added. This description can be viewed in the Details section in the Portal. Users with editor or owner right can edit the description associated to a log.

• Improvement: When saving a BPMN model in Process Discoverer, the pop-up window now includes a Folder section. It is possible to select the folder where the model will be saved using the Browse button. By default, the process model is saved in the same folder as the event log.

• Improvement: Costs with a decimal component are supported in the Cost Center.

• Improvement: Performance improvements have been made to reduce the time required to apply log filters consisting of many filter criteria.

• Improvement: The Creator of each process model is now displayed in the Portal.

• Fix: The button “Download simulation configuration” is disabled for users with a Viewer role.

• Fix: Filters applied in Process Discoverer do not use the calendar (when a calendar is associated with the log).

• Fix: Incorrect access control propagation: when one access right is changed in a folder, all existing access rights are propagated to the subfolders instead of only propagating the modified access right.

• Fix: After a calendar is applied to a log, the restore button in the Calendar Management window does not restore the default (24/7) calendar

• Fix: The search box is not working in the “Case ID” filter window.

• Fix: Cannot delete a published process model

• Fix: The download button does not work for simulated logs.

• Fix: The simulation editor continues displaying the error message “the sum of the probabilities should be one” after the user has fixed the issue.

• Fix: The conformance checker is unable to match the activity labels in the model and the log when they contain double-byte (Japanese/Chinese) characters.

• Fix: When a user extracts a log from the Workspace connector and reimports it, the log cannot be used in the Dashboard nor Filters.

• Fix: SSO Users having special characters in their email address are not able to access process models.

• Fix: In published model versions, the version auto-increase feature produces an incorrect number.

Version 9.2

Release Date: April, 2023

Enhancements to Dashboards

Quick range filters in dashboards

You can apply a filter to any chart by selecting a range of values. The filter is applied to all charts in the dashboard. For example, by selecting the corresponding range in the chart of case durations and then clicking on the filter (funnel) icon in that chart, you retain all cases that have a duration of up to 60 days. The filter can be removed with the remove icon found in each chart.

Drill-throughs from dashboard

From a dashboard, you can now navigate to the Process Discoverer to visualize the event log with the currently active filter. For example, after applying a filter to retain all cases that take less 60 days, you can navigate to Process Discoverer to visualize the process map of those cases.

Enhancements to ETL Pipelines

User Interface (UI) Enhancements

The former Extract view in the ETL data pipelines module has been split into two views:

An Extract view, where you upload and designate the tables to be processed by the ETL data pipeline. The Extract view consists of one tile per data source. The available data sources are:

• File upload: Upload a file manually

• Workspace: Retrieve a file from an existing folder in the Apromore workspace

• Amazon S3: Retrieve a file from the Amazon S3 bucket of your tenancy. This option is only available to users with data engineering privileges.

• Relational database: This option requires access to a supported relational database.

A Merge view, where you specify how these tables are merged, for example via join or append operations. In the Merge view, you can switch between:

• A list view, where each operation is specified as a row.

• A graph view, consisting of tiles and arrows. A tile represents a table and an arrow indicates a merge operation.

Pipeline chaining

Once you have defined a pipeline, in the Load phase, you can chain the current pipeline to another pipeline. This means that the output of the first pipeline will be given as one of the inputs to the second pipeline. In this way, you can define your pipelines modularly. For example, a data pipeline that extracts data from a CRM system can be chained with a second pipeline that enhances the CRM data with data from a legacy system.

Eviction periods in delta uploads

When a delta upload is performed, you can specify that only the data of the past X days (e.g. 90 days) is kept in the event log. Data older than this limit is evicted.

Enhancements to Business Process Simulation

External delays in arcs

After selecting an sequence flow (arc) in the business process editor, you can set an external delay in the Simulation tab. For example, you can set the external delay to 10 minutes. Each time this arc is traversed during a simulation, the specified delay (e.g. 10 minutes) is added to the current case duration. This delay is equivalent to inserting an intermediate timer event between the source and the target of the arc.

Multiple inter-arrival timetables

You can specify different inter-case arrival times for different periods of the day or week. For example, you can specify that the arrival time from Monday to Friday 8:00 to 18:00 is one case every two minutes (30 cases per hour), while the interarrival time on Monday to Friday between 00:00 and 08:00 and between 18:00 and 24:00 is one case every 12 minutes (5 cases per hour), and the same for the weekend times.

To specify multiple inter-arrival timetables, add an inter-arrival timetable and specify the inter-case arrival time for that timetable. To specify the previous example, you need to add four timetables: Monday-Friday 00:00 to 08:00, Monday-Friday 08:00 to 18:00, Monday-Friday 18:00 to 23:59:59, and Saturday-Sunday 00:00 to 23:59:59, and you then need to assign the corresponding inter-arrival times to each timetable in the General tab of the simulation editor. The timetables should first be specified and named in the Timetables tab of the simulation editor.

Duration-based conditions in the conditional flows

You can use the case duration as an attribute when you specify conditions in a sequence flow coming out of a decision gatway (a conditional flow). The case duration is interpeted as the time since the creation of the currently simulated case. For example, you may specify that a flow of a decision gateway should be taken when the time since the start of the case is more than 8 days. In this case, if the currently simulated case has been ongoing for more than 8 days, this pathway will be taken. You can combine duration-based conditions such as this one, with conditions based on other case attributes.

Fixed cost per activity execution

You can specify that each time an activity is executed, we incur a fixed cost, such as a material cost or a pay-per-use fee for an external service. For example, you can specify that there is a fee of 2 dollars each time we perform a credit history check. This fixed cost is added to the labor cost of performing the credit history check.

Assignment of activities to roles

You can now assign an activity to a role in the simulation editor. A role is defined as one or multiple resource pools. For example, a role “Claims Handler” can consists of two resource pools: “Senior Claims Handler” and “Junior Claims Handler”. Assigning an activity to a role means that any resource belonging to one of these resource pools may be assigned to this activity.

Enhancements to Predictive Process Monitoring

Prediction refresh after delta upload

• Predictions are re-computed after every delta-upload to an event log.

• Each remaining time prediction is now accompanied by a confidence interval.

Enhancements to User Administration

User activity history

• Each user can see the history of their recent operations, by using the User menu (in the top-right corner). This allows users to retrace the steps they took to achieve a result. The history can be exported as a spreadsheet. The history only contains the steps performed without details about the data.

• Users with administration privilege can view the history of activity of all users in their tenancy.

License management

• Users with administration privileges can view license parameters (e.g. number of available user licenses).

• When a new role is created, a license type must be assigned to it.

• When a role is assigned to a user, the available licenses are updated.

Minor Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improvement: Whenever a log download completes, notifications are shown in a dedicated icon (top-right corner of any window).

• Improvement: In the ETL data pipelines, the log schema defined in the Load phase is saved and reloaded every time a pipeline is edited.

• Improvement: In Process Discoverer, in the Cost Center window, you can assign a calendar to each role separately. If a calendar is assigned to a role, this role-level calendar overrides the calendar assigned to the whole log (if there is one). This feature allows you to define different timetables for different roles (e.g. one timetable for Claims Analyst and another one for Claims Officer).

• Improvement: In the quick filter window in Process Discoverer, when a case attribute is selected, the values of the selected case attributes are immediately displayed (no click required).

• Improvement: In the BPMN editor, you can now copy a map or part of a map from one BPMN model to another.

• Improvement: In the BPMN model editor, you can copy-paste an element or a selected set of elements from one model editor window to another.

• Improvement: In the simulation editor, you can specify a time-zone for the simulation. All times during the simulation are interpreted in this time zone.

• Improvement: In the simulation editor, you can download the simulation parameters in CSV format (spreadsheet).

• Improvement: In the simulation editor, in the Task tab, two new options are available in the type of probability distribution: histogram distribution and skewed uniform distribution.

• Improvement: In the simulator, after running a simulation, the simulated event log now contains columns corresponding to each case attribute specified in the simulation scenario, a role column, and cost information. The inclusion of roles and cost information allows the simulated log to be analyzed using cost overlays in Process Discoverer and cost metrics in the Log Filtering module.

• Improvement: All functionality is now available in the contextual menus (right-click menus). Accordingly, the top menu bar has been removed from the Portal.

• Improvement: Faster loading times when importing event logs of smaller sizes (less than 10MB).

• Improvement: Performance improvements in the log animator.

• Fix: When a user with a special character in the email id logs in via SSO and opens BPMN Editor, the model does not load.

• Fix: When an administrator tries to change a role of a user with a special character in the email id, the page refreshes.

• Fix: When a user uses the workspace connector to extract logs, the column names are not readable names.

• Fix: In the Attribute filters, when an attribute is of type timestamps, the values are displayed as numbers instead of formatted dates and times.

• Fix: Version numbers starting with zeroes in the minor and micro value positions are incorrectly displayed in the portal (e.g. 1.01 displayed as 1.1 and 1.1.01 displayed as 1.1.1).

• Fix: The event log importer does not return an error message when the start time of an activity instance is greater than its completion time.

• Fix: A empty (blank) window is displayed instead of the case timeline when the user has ignored some attributes during log import.

• Fix: When one of the case attribute is a numerical and contains Null (empty) values, the dropdown of case attributes in the Attribute Filter lists some event attributes in addition to the case attributes.

Version 9.1

Release Date: March, 2023

Feature/Enhancement

KPI Center

Apromore now provides the ability to define Key Performance Indictors (KPIs) to measure process-level conformance and performance. A process KPI is either an absolute number or a percentage of cases (across an entire process or a subset of the process) that fulfill a condition. Examples of KPIs include:

• Percentage of cases in the entire log that have completed in more than 5 days

• Number of cases where the invoice was approved by the same perform who approved the invoice payment

You can display a list of KPIs and their associated values in the “KPI popup” in the Portal, Process Discoverer, or Dashboard. You can create additional KPI tiles in the Dashboard. These tiles are synchronized with the KPIs, and they change as the KPIs are edited.

Enhancements to Business Process Simulator

The Business Process Simulator now includes the following enhancements:

• We can specify that certain cases should be prioritized over others based on case attributes. For example, we can specify that cases where the CustomerType = “Premium” should have higher priority than those where CustomerType = “Regular”. Resources are first allocated to activity instances within cases with higher priority.

• We can define “Teams” in a simulation model. A team is a set of roles. For example a “Claims Handlers” team may consist of three roles: “Junior Claims Handlers”, “Senior Claims Handlers” and “Lead Claims Handlers”. If an activity is assigned to a team, an instance of this activity may be assigned to any resource whose role is part of the team.

• We can assign multiple roles or multiple teams to the same task. If a task is assigned to multiple roles, the task may be performed by any resource who has this role.

• We can set the maximum deviation in the branching probabilities. If the probability of a conditional flow is 50%, and the maximum deviation is 5%, then in any simulation, this conditional flow will be chosen between 45% and 55% of times (counting the cases where the source node of the conditional flow is reached).

• We can limit the number of times a conditional flow is taken. If the limit of a conditional flow is set to 5, then this conditional flow will not be taken more than 5 times in any given case. This feature allows users to prevent infinite loops, or to prevent situations where a loop is executed for unreasonable number of times.

Enhancements to Process Discoverer

• Quick Filters: We can now apply a case attribute filter with one click in the Process Discoverer, for example to view the process map for “Premium” customers only or for “Regular” processes in one click

• Case Timeline View in Process Discoverer: We can open the case timeline view in the Process Discoverer by double-clicking on a case in the “Case Inspector”.

Enhancements to Dashboards

• Resource handoff heatmaps: We can now create a heatmap to display how many times a resource hands over work to another resource.

• Consecutive activities heatmaps: We can now create a heatmap to display how many times an activity is followed by another activity to find the most frequent transitions

Enhancements to Process Model Editor

• Apromore now provides the ability to hide text annotations in a process model.

• We can now attach multiple images or multiple documents to an activity.

• Published models are now frozen. They can only be edited when unpublished.

• We can now publish multiple versions of the same model.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improvement: A user can now select scenario timezone in the Business Process Simulator.

• Improvement: Additional options like average cost, average frequency, relative case frequency, median duration and max duration are added to the abstraction settings.

• Fix: When a task type is changed to a subprocess, the BPMN editor becomes unresponsive.

• Fix: When a user sets incorrect timestamp in ETL, the ETL window becomes unresponsive.

• Fix: When nodes slider is set to less than 100 in Process Discoverer, the BPMN model could not be saved.

• Fix: When user made any changes in the BPMN Editor, the auto save feature did not work and the changes were not saved.

• Fix: When user imports a log, the columns were not automatically detected due to presence of all uppercase letters.

Version 9.0

Release Date: December, 2022

Feature/Enhancement

New process mining engine based on Big Data technology

• Apromore now provides you with the ability to handle event logs of up to hundreds of millions of events. The new data layer of Apromore leverages Amazon’s elastic map-reduce technology, which enables you to start with a smaller capacity and seamlessly scale up to larger datasets sizes based on your needs.

Delta Upload

• You can now append additional events to an existing event log. For example, you can add data from April 2022 to an event log containing data for the period January-March 2022. Delta uploads can be triggered via ETL or APIs. The associated metadata like filters and dashboards are updated automatically.

S3 and Workspace Connector

• Apromore now allows you to pick files from Apromore’s S3 data volume or a user’s workspace using ETL. A user should have a Superuser or Data Engineer role to use the S3 connector.

Recent and Favorites

• A user can now see the list of recent files they have been working on, and can also mark files and folders as favorites in the Apromore workspace.

Relative Filters

• You can define tiles and gages that display the percentage of cases within a population that fulfill a set of criteria. For example, you can define a tile that displays the percentage of cases in Australia (the population) that have a case duration greater than five days (the relative filter). This can be achieved by means of the “reset counter” button in the Filter window. The reset counter button divides a list of filter criteria into two groups separated by a line. The criteria above the dividing line define the population (e.g. country = “Australia”), while the criteria below the line define the relative filter (e.g. case duration > 5 days).

Additional ETL Operators

• In the Transform section of the ETL data pipelines environment, you can now use the following operators:

1. Remove a row from the dataset

2. Check if a cells “contains” a pattern (string matching). For example, you can check if a cell starts with a prefix “US-”.

3. Check if a cell is of a given type (“Is of type”), for example, check if a column is numeric. This allows you, for example, to define a rule that removes all rows such that the value of column “Amount” is not numeric.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improvement: A user can now auto align elements in the BPMN Editor.

• Improvement: A user can now choose to whether or not enable autosave option in BPMN Editor.

• Improvement: A column of type Numeric or Timestamp (except for columns tagged as the Start Timestamp or the Completion Timestamp) may contain empty values. These empty values will show up as NULL values in the dashboard and in the filters.

• Fix: When an event log with a Japanese special character is opened in process discoverer, the process map not visible.

• Fix: When a user Is viewing a change in the model comparator, the positioning of models is lost.

• Fix: When charts are exported from dashboards, the Japanese labels appeared as garbled text.

Version 8.5

Release Date: August, 2022

Feature/Enhancement

Activity and Case Cost Metrics in Dashboards and Filters

• Apromore now allows you to use cost metrics in the widgets of the dashboard and also provides the ability to specify cost-based filters at the case and node level (activity, resource, role, etc).

Simulating a Model with Categorical and Numerical Attributes

• You can now simulate a model by defining different categorical and numerical attributes and use them as conditions from outgoing arcs of (X)OR-splits.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improvement: Log animation can now be performed on a BPMN model with pools, lanes, and data objects/stores.

• Improvement: A subprocess can now be connected to a specific version of an existing process model.

• Improvement: A user can now traverse between different subprocesses when published.

• Improvement: A user can now choose the desired location to save a model.

• Improvement: The size of different tasks can now be changed in the BPMN editor.

• Fix: When exporting a BPMN model as a PDF/PNG, the model name was a generic name.

• Fix: When saving a simulated log, the resultant log was saved in a wrong location.

• Fix: When opening an event log containing Japanese characters, the process map was not visible due to the presence of the katakana middle dot character.

• Fix: When exporting a BPMN model containing Japanese characters as PDF, the characters were not visible.

Version 8.4

Release Date: June, 2022

Feature/Enhancement

Predictive Process Monitoring

• Apromore now allows you to train one or more predictive machine learning models from an event log. Given an event log, you can train a machine learning model to predict:

1. The remaining time of an ongoing case until its completion

2. Whether an ongoing case will reach a given outcome or not, for example, will a case in a price quotation process reach a state where the customer places an order or will an order-to-cash process reach a state where the customer returns the product.

You can also view the quality metrics of a trained machine learning model, such as its accuracy metrics, as well as different charts to explain how the predictor works, such as the most important features that the model uses to make predictions. Given an event log containing data about ongoing cases of a process, you can use the predictive models you have previously trained to generate a table with predictions for each of the cases in the event log.

Mulesoft Anypoint Connector for Apromore

• The Mulesoft Anypoint Connector for Apromore allows you to ingest data from external systems into Apromore. For example, you can use the Apromore connector to ingest incident management data from Service Cloud to perform analysis to uncover different friction points like bottlenecks and identify improvement opportunities in the process.

Compatibility:

Application/Service	Version
Mule Runtime	4.3.x and later
Anypoint Studio	7.11.x and later

ETL Vertical Union

• Apromore now allows you to perform a union of two event logs. For example, if you have an event log of an order-to-cash process for the period January-March, and another event log of the same process for the period April-June, you can create an event log for the period January-June by doing a Union of these two event logs in a data pipeline in the ETL module. The two event logs in a Union do not necessarily need to have the same columns. For example, you can join an event log of a purchase order handling process with an event log of a product delivery process (child process). The union operator will return a log with the union of the attributes in one log and in the other (but the shared columns are only represented once), and the union of the rows in the two logs.

ETL Parent-Child Union

• Apromore allows you to perform a parent-child union between an event log of a parent process and an event log of a child process. This union operator is specifically designed for the scenario where an instance of one process (the parent process) spawns one or more instances of another process (the child process). For example, you can join an insurance policy management process (the parent process) with an insurance claim process (the child process). The Parent-Child union operator implements a best-effort approach to fill in any missing case identifiers of the parent process. In the above example, the parent-child union tries to ensure that every row in the resulting log has an insurance policy ID, so that you can use the insurance policy ID as a case identifier when loading the resulting log into the Apromore workspace.

Resize font size in BPMN Editor

• Apromore now allows you to change the font size of BPMN elements in the BPMN editor.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improvement: The conformance checker layout algorithm has been improved to relay the new elements in the canvas.

• Improvement: A parameter can be configured to assign viewer as a default role for newly created users.

• Improvement: Existing APIs have been migrated to make use of Spring Rest.

• Improvement: An operator that can be used to round of the number of decimals of a column has been added in ETL

• Fix: When exporting a BPMN model as a PDF with attachments, the PDF did not include the attachments

• Fix: When checking the last activity details in the access management window, the date field was empty.

• Fix: When exporting a PDF from a BPMN model containing Japanese characters, the activity names were not visible.

Version 8.3

Release Date: April, 2022

Feature/Enhancement

Data-driven Simulation

• Apromore now allows you to automatically discover a BPMN model with simulation parameters from an event log. When saving the BPMN model in Process Discoverer, select the option “include simulation parameters” to obtain a model that is ready for simulation.

Cost Overlay

• Apromore now allows you to display cost metrics on top of a process map or a BPMN model in the Process Discoverer. This option is available in the “overlay” section of the Process Discover menu. In order to display a cost overlay, you should associate a cost per time unit to each role present in the event log.

Import and Export of Dashboard and Filter Templates

• Apromore now gives you the option of exporting and importing dashboard and filter templates. To export/import a dashboard or filter template, select the option “Load template” in the Dashboard/Filter window.

Auto save a BPMN Model

• Apromore now automatically saves your work in the BPMN Editor so that you can revisit your changes in case of accidental closing of the BPMN Editor.

Link subprocess to other processes

• Apromore now allows you to link a subprocess to other processes. You can choose to link your subprocess with a new or an existing process. To link a subprocess to a process, click on the “+” button of a subprocess activity and link it to the desired process.

Comments in BPMN Editor

• Apromore now allows you to create and edit comments in the BPMN editor. Comments can be attached to any flow object in BPMN (activity, event, or gateway).

Property Drawer in BPMN Editor

• Apromore now allows you to create different custom attributes for different BPMN elements. For example, you can use the properties drawer in the BPMN editor to attach custom attributes such as “cost”, “priority”, or “risk” to a given activity.

Anonymization in ETL

• The “anonymize” toggle button is now also available in the ETL data pipelines module. If you turn on the button for a given column, all values in that column will be replaced by hash codes when the data is imported.

Custom Roles

• You can now create custom roles (e.g. Auditor, Financial Manager) and by assigning visibility options to a user based on your organizational requirements (e.g. an Auditor can open an event log in read-only mode in Process Discoverer and Dashboard but cannot apply filters nor run simulations).

LDAP Support

• Apromore can now be connected with your corporate LDAP directory for authentication (in addition to the existing SAML-based single sign-on option).

Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improvement: You can choose to view the case variants by percentage, duration, and alignment ratio in the conformance checker.

• Improvement: You can now export multiple logs or models at a time.

• Improvement: You can now sort the artifacts in the portal by type, name, creation date, last version, last update, or owner.

• Improvement: A message is shown when there are invalid rows discovered during log import due to the consideration of daylight savings time.

• Fix: The ordering of the folder structure in the left panel was not following a sequence.

• Fix: When importing a parquet file via the log importer, the error report only contained the first error.

• Fix: When copying and pasting the style formatting on a dashboard tile/chart, an error message is displayed.

• Fix: When the language was switched to Japanese, the conformance checking option was disabled.

Version 8.2

Release Date: January, 2022

Feature/Enhancement

Publish Models

• Apromore now allows you to publish a BPMN model and share the URL with other users.

Additional charts in dashboard

• Apromore now allows you to use different charts like heatmaps, treemaps, and solid gauge in the dashboard.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improvement: You can now change the color of elements from a palette in the BPMN Editor.

• Improvement: You can now add images, icons, hyperlinks as attachments to your BPMN model in the BPMN Editor.

• Improvement: You can now see the compute variability ratio between the case variants and cases in the process discoverer.

• Fix: A parquet file could not be exported for a dashboard view having more than one table of same type and attribute.

• Fix: An error message popped up when trying to export a CSV in dashboard with a view consisting of two different tables.

Version 8.1

Release Date: December, 2021

Feature/Enhancement

Conformance Checker

• Apromore now allows you to compare a log and a BPMN model to perform delta analysis. For example, When you compare a process model and an event log using delta analysis, the tool displays the differences and allows you to overlay the differences on top of the process models.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improvement: You can now move artifacts in the Apromore workspace by drag and drop method.

• Improvement: Functions like launching dashboards/filters can now be accessed by right clicking on a log/model.

• Improvement: Functions such as cut/copy/paste can now be performed via keyboard shortcuts.

• Improvement: Custom calendars can now be accessed via process discoverer and dashboard.

• Fix: The dashboard was not loading when it was associated to a custom calendar.

• Fix: Duplicate parquet files were generated from different case variant table in the dashboard.

• Fix: The search similarity results view was mixed up in the Apromore portal.

Version 8.0

Release Date: November, 2021

Feature/Enhancement

Custom Calendars

• Apromore now provides the ability to create and edit custom calendars and to associate a custom calendar with an event log. When creating a calendar, you can include public holidays based on your location and add custom holidays to the calendar.

Delta Analysis between process models

• Apromore now allows you to compare two BPMN process models to perform delta analysis. For example, you can use delta analysis to compare a process model discovered from an event log (capturing the as-is process) with a reference process model (capturing a to-be process). When you compare two process models using delta analysis, the tool displays the differences and allows you to overlay the differences on top of the process models.

Filter and Dashboard Templates

• Apromore now provides the ability to save a filter or a dashboard template that you have defined on an event log, and to apply the saved template to another log. For example, you can create a dashboard template on an event log containing all the cases of an order-to-cash process that completed in October, and then copy it to an event log containing all the cases of the same order-to-cash process for the month of November.

Internationalization

• Apromore now provides the option to switch between different languages. Currently, we support English and Japanese, with German coming soon. New languages can easily be added.

Support for Group Authorization

• Apromore now supports group-based authorization using groups extracted from an external identity provider (SAML or LDAP).

Anonymization

• You can now choose to anonymize one or more columns during log import by selecting the “anonymization” icon on the columns you wish to anonymize. For example, you may anonymize sensitive information such as case IDs and resource names.

Automatic data ingestion via the S3 connector

• You can now ingest data into Apromore via our AWS S3 Connector. The logs can be pushed into S3 buckets via data ingestion pipelines, and picked up automatically by Apromore to be registered in Apromore’s repository. The S3 bucket can be hosted by Apromore or the customer, in their private AWS cloud. Encryption can be managed by AWS with customer-provided master key, or directly by the customer.

Case and Event attribute on X and Y-axis

• We have added more customization options to Apromore’s Dashboard. You can now display numerical or categorical case/event attributes on the X and Y-axis of any chart in a dashboard. For example, you can create a chart to display the number of resources (Y-axis) who perform each activity in the log (X-axis). If you select a numeric attribute in the Y-axis, you can also select an aggregation function such as average, total, median, etc. For example, you can create a chart that displays the countries on the X-axis and for each country, the total revenue on the Y-axis.

KPI Thresholds and Reference lines

• In the Dashboard, you can now set KPI thresholds and add reference lines for average and median, as well as custom reference lines, along both X and Y-axis. For example, you can choose to add a KPI threshold to separate the cases with a higher waiting time from those with a lower waiting time, or show the average number of active cases over time in the Work-in-Progress area chart.

Exporting Dashboard Analytics to S3 buckets

• Apromore now provides the capability to export dashboard analytics as CSV or Parquet files and save these locally or on an AWS S3 bucket.

Between Filter

• With a couple of clicks, you can now define a new filter criterion to retain or remove events between the first or last occurrence of a source and target node in the process map. For example, you can retain all events between the first occurrence of the “Send invoice” activity and the last occurrence of the “Receive payment” activity.

Save and edit ETL data pipelines

• Apromore now supports the ability to save and edit data ingestion pipelines. For example, you can now edit an existing pipeline by replacing the existing logs with an event log with the latest data.

Performance Improvement in Dashboard

• The performance of the operations performed on large logs in the dashboard has been improved.

Case Variant Inspector

• You can now inspect each case variant individually using the case variant inspector in the Process Discoverer plugin, and check out the value of attributes for each node in the variant.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improvement: The start and end timestamps were exported in a single column when exporting an event log in CSV format. Now, both timestamps are placed in separate columns within the same row.

• Improvement: You can now choose to tag a column as a Perspective in the Log Importer. Once done, you can switch between these perspectives in Process Discoverer.

• Improvement: The Log Importer now supports ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) encoding type.

• Improvement: An event log with a standard ISO-8601 format timestamp can now be imported into Apromore.

• Improvement: The ETL plugin now supports the ability to subtract two timestamps and trim a column value.

• Improvement: You can now upload zipped BPMN models

• Improvement: You can now set the name of the log when importing it into Apromore

• Improvement: A BPMN model shared with a viewer cannot be exported/modified.

• Fix: A log containing a case ID greater than 15 digits could not be uploaded.

• Fix: The labels on gateways in a BPMN model were not getting updated when changing them.

• Fix: Uploading files in Apromore using the ETL plugin used to throw an error when connecting to an S3 bucket with a name greater than 30 characters.

Version 7.20

Release Date: June, 2021

Feature/Enhancement

Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) Console

• Apromore now comes with a graphical ETL console that allows you to compose event logs from one or more tables or data sources. The ETL console allows you to define data pipelines to extract tables from relational databases, transform these tables to compose an event log, and load the resulting event log table into Apromore. In addition to different join operations, you can remove columns and create columns in the event log by composing existing columns using arithmetic, concatenation, and find-and-replace operations. For example, you can add a “Cost” column to an event log and compute this cost based on the hourly rate of your resources and the duration of tasks. You can also schedule a data pipeline to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly jobs to extract, transform, and load event logs into Apromore.

Single Sign-on Support

• Apromore can now be connected with your corporate identity system for single sign-on (SAML or OpenID).

Storage in Amazon S3 buckets

• Apromore now comes with an option to store your event logs in a dedicated Amazon S3 bucket for high reliability and security (available for enterprise licenses only). Your IT security team can be given rights to audit your tenancy’s S3 bucket. The data in your tenancy’s S3 bucket is protected at all times using either an Amazon S3-managed encryption key or an encryption key provided by your IT team. This enables your IT team to have full control over access to your event logs.

Transfer Ownership

• Before deleting a user, you can transfer ownership of all the assets (models, logs, analytics artifacts) to better manage business continuity.

Fine-Grained Sharing

• You can choose to share individual dashboards and filters associated with a log by giving a user restricted viewer rights. For example, when sharing an event log, you can choose which specific dashboards or filters you wish to share, as an alternative to sharing all the associated dashboards and filters.

Case Length Filter

• You can now filter out cases based on case length (number of activity instances in the case). For example, you can retain or remove all cases whose length is between 3 to 15 activity instances.

Undo/Redo Filter

• You can remove/reinstate a filter criterion using the undo/redo filter buttons in Process Discover.

Performance Improvements in Filter

• The performance of the filter operations on large logs has been improved.

Look-and-feel improvements in Log Animator

• The ability to hide/unhide tokens of a log in a multi-log animation has been introduced. You can also customize the color of the tokens.

Report Issue

• A Report Issue button has been introduced to allow users to report bugs.

Recursive Folder Sharing

• You can now share a folder in such a way that all sub-folders and files inside that folder are shared along, recursively.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improvement: When trying to animate a syntactically incorrect process model, the log importer now shows user-friendly error messages.

• Improvement: You can now animate both process maps and BPMN models directly inside Process Discoverer.

• Improvement: File names can now contain commas and periods

• Improvement: A new “Generate report” function in the dashboard allows you to choose which tiles, charts, and tables you wish to include in the Word, PDF or Powerpoint report (or you can select “all” to include everything).

• Fix: The BPMN editor gives an error message when you change the version number to a different format.

• Fix: The shortcut for opening the arc duration filter is not working.

• Fix: In the slice log window, the number of cases is incorrect.

• Fix: Column names with accented letters are not displayed in the log importer.

• Fix: When a logs contains empty column names, no data is shown in the log importer.

• Fix: Access rights management window gives an error when the group name matches the user name.

• Fix: The fields in the user creation window are not validated

• Fix: Incorrect error message is given when a file name contains more than 60 characters.

Version 7.19

Release Date: January, 2021

Feature/Enhancement

Process Simulator

• You can now attach a simulation scenario to a BPMN model and simulate a model with an attached simulation scenario. The output of a simulation is a simulated log. You can analyze a simulated log using all the functionality available in Apromore (Process Discoverer, Dashboard, etc.). In the Dashboard, you can view a range of statistics for simulated logs, including case duration, case duration within timetable, case waiting time, cycle time, waiting time, and cost.

Node duration performance filter

• You can filter out cases based on the node’s duration.

Arc duration performance filter

• You can filter out cases based on the arc’s duration.

Secondary attribute filter

• You can filter out cases based on two attributes simultaneously, for example, retain or remove all cases where there is an event with Activity = “Create order” (primary attribute) and Resource = “John Smith” (secondary attribute).

Share filters and dashboards

• Multiple users can edit filters and dashboards concurrently.

Dashboard auto-saving

• You can now choose whether or not to auto-save changes to your dashboards.

Export dashboards

• You can now export your dashboards in a variety of formats incl. Word and PowerPoint to create professionally looking reports.

Timestamp format detection in CSV Importer

• A wider range of timestamp formats are now supported.

Timezone detection in CSV Importer

• When you import a CSV/XLSX/Parquet file, the timezone is automatically detected.

Import Parquet and XLSX files

• You can upload a parquet or XLSX file.

Performance and look-and-feel improvements in Log Animator

• The responsiveness of the log animator has been improved. When a large number of tokens are stuck in the same arc, a bubble is shown instead of showing individual tokens.

Version 7.18

Release Date: October, 2020

Feature/Enhancement

Portal grid view

• You can browse through the folders and files in Apromore’s Portal in grid format (default mode) in addition to the old list format.

Import log from URL

• You can import a file from Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or from any URL.

• See: Upload a file from URL

Save and share filters

• You can save filters associated with a log and share these filters alongside the event log.

• Note: Only the owner of an event log can save, edit, or remove the filters associated with that log. Other users can define temporary filters but not save them.

Customize, save & share performance dashboards

• You can add, remove, or customize any performance indicator, chart or table in the default views of the performance dashboard.

• You can add one or more custom views to the performance dashboard of a log. Custom views can be created from existing views or from scratch.

• You can save and share dashboards. All changes you make to a performance dashboard are saved together with the event log and are visible to all users who have access to the log.

• See: Video demonstration of the new Performance Dashboard.

• Note: Only the owner of a log can edit the performance dashboard of the log. Other users can make a copy of a log and customize the dashboard on a copy of the log

Reusing CSV import schemas

• When you import a CSV file, the mapping of the columns (schema mapping) is automatically saved. When you later import a CSV file with the same column headers, the CSV importer prompts a dialog box to let you choose whether to apply the saved mapping or not.

Clear applied filters

• You can clear all the filters on the current log in Process Discoverer with a single click.

Search box in Process Discoverer

• A new search box in Process Discover allows you to search for a node (e.g. activity) by its name or a prefix of the name. All nodes that match the search string are highlighted.

Enhanced users and groups management

• You can grant access rights to any folder and file you own either to an individual user or to a group.

• Administrators can create groups and assign users to groups.

• See: Users and groups management

Download process performance stats from dashboard

• You can download the data behind any chart or table in the performance dashboard in CSV format, or you can download all CSV files with the data in the performance dashboard in a single zip file

Copying and moving logs or process models

• You can copy or move files across the folders in the Portal via the copy, cut, and paste icons.

Improved session management

• We have made improvements to session management to improve performance and reduce session timeouts.

LDAP Authentication

• System administrators can more easily configure Apromore to connect to a corporate LDAP directory for authentication.

New shortcuts for filtering

• You can open the case filter, case variant filter, event filter, activity filter, performance and timeframe filters in one click from the Process Discoverer by clicking on the respective icons in the Log Statistics and Temporal statistics sections of the Process Discoverer.

Relative case frequency overlay

• You can now display the relative case frequency on each node/arc in the Process Discoverer. The relative case frequency is the percentage of cases in which a given node or directly-follows relation occurs.

Bug Fix

Folder and file renaming

• The portal gives an error message when you enter forbidden characters in file name.

Handling of long labels

• Fixed a bug that made long activity or node labels to go across the corresponding node in the process map/model.

Version 7.16

Release Date: June, 2020

• New Features:

  • Tiles of performance measures can now be created in custom dashboards. These can be useful to display a set of standard and user-defined KPIs, in addition to the custom charts

  • Aggregated log stats can now be exported from the Dashboard into CSV files

  • Reimplemented median calculations for frequencies and durations in Process Discoverer

  • Introduced “breadcrumbs” for easier Portal navigation

  • Process models and logs can now be searched for from the Search bar of the Portal

• Improvements:

  • Improved memory management across various plugins

  • Process models created by the Merge plugin are now automatically laid out

  • Improved automatic detection of various timestamp formats in CSV Importer

  • Automatic detection of case attributes and event attributes in CSV Importer

  • Removed unused fields in the Portal

  • Simplified import of process models

  • Multiple visual and performance improvements in custom dashboards

• Bug Fix:

  • Fixed issue with not being able to animate some logs

  • Fixed issue with misaligned timelines in the log animation

  • Fixed issue with CSV importer failing due to missing case identifiers or activity names

  • Fixed issue with the results of Similarity Search not being displayed until the Portal is refreshed

  • Fixed some issues with the Rework & repetition filter

Version 7.15

Release Date: May, 2020

• Process Discoverer: New ribbon interface makes it easier to tune and switch between visualization and abstraction settings

• Dashboard: Ability to create customized charts with user-defined KPIs

• Portal:

  • Enhanced user registration screen

  • Ability to choose file format when downloading event logs (XES or CSV, and encoding for CSV files)

• Log Animation: Visual improvements in the Log Animation

• CSV Importer: UI and performance improvements

• Various bug fixes and performance improvements

Version 7.14

Release Date: March, 2020

• Process Discoverer:

  • Re-engineered plugin with new internal, high-performing data structure

  • Re-designed user interface with new abstraction functionality and statistics visualization

• Filter:

  • Cosmetic improvements

  • Performance improvements

• Dashboard:

  • Log cloning feature

  • Cosmetic improvements

  • Performance improvements

• Various bug fixes and performance improvements

Version 7.13

Release Date: February, 2020

• New modern UI featuring consistent branding and look & feel

• CSV Importer:

  • Support for non UTF-8 encodings

  • Fault tolerance (e.g. missing attribute value)

• Filter:

  • New Rework & Repetition filter makes it easier to track cases with repeated tasks (e.g. rework due to amendments)

  • Ability to search for specific cases and event attributes when setting filters

  • New Case variant and Case ID Inspector view

• Process Discoverer:

  • Pie charts to show the percentage of cases, variants and events left after applying a filter

  • Performance improvements

• Dashboard:

  • Distinction between Case attributes and Event attributes

  • Relative frequency in Activities and Resources views

  • Performance improvements

• Single Editor for process modeling based on BPMN.io (legacy editor deprecated)

• Various bug fixes

Version 7.10

Release Date: December, 2019

• Filter:

  • Advanced case variant filter to show the distribution of case variants

  • Advanced options for the Eventually-follows filter

  • Filtering by processing time, waiting time and case utilization when events have start timestamps

  • Advanced options for Time window filters (case contained in the time window, active in, starts in, ends in)

  • Ability to download and upload filter criteria for reuse

  • Pie charts to show the percentage of cases, variants and events left after applying a filter

  • Minor cosmetic fixes

• Dashboard:

  • Support for case-level attributes

  • Minor cosmetic fixes

• CSV Importer:

  • Improved data type detection

  • Ability to import zipped and gzipped CSV files

• Process Discoverer: Various bug fixes and improvements

• Caching mechanism to improve system performance

Version 7.8

Release Date: October, 2019

• Filter: Advanced filtering options

• CSV Importer: More robust CSV Importer

• Improved handling of security permissions for event logs

• Process Discoverer:

  • Performance and visual improvements

  • Various bug fixes

Version 7.6

Release Date: August, 2019

• Filter: New Filter plugin

• Process Discoverer: Various bug fixes and performance and visual improvements

• CSV Importer: More robust CSV Importer

• Improved handling of security permissions for event logs (Security button)

• Migrated to the current version of ZK libraries 8.6.0.1

• Dynamic switching of UI themes (Account -> Change theme)

Version 7.5

Release Date: August, 2019

• Dashboard: New Dashboard plugin

• Process Discoverer:

  • Automatic centering and fit to screen when changing layout

  • Various bug fixes and performance improvements

• CSV Importer:

  • Improved tolerance for errors while importing CSVs

  • More robust mechanism to recognize timestamp format

  • Multiple UI improvements

• Added password recovery feature