Traditional business process management (BPM) practice has largely relied on rough estimations and manual data gathering techniques when discovering, analyzing, and redesigning business processes.

These techniques are effective when it comes to capturing and conceptualizing the “happy paths” of a process, but they fall short of providing a fully detailed picture thereof, including the numerous exceptions and deviations that generally characterize the performance of the process on a day-to-day basis. This may lead analysts to misestimate the actual bottlenecks and sources of defects of the process.

Evidence-based BPM is the practice of systematically using data produced during the execution of business processes to discover, analyze, and continuously monitor and improve business processes.