Existing process mining techniques provide summary views of the overall process performance over a period of time, allowing analysts to identify bottlenecks and associated performance issues. However, these tools are not designed to help analysts understand how bottlenecks form and dissolve over time nor how the formation and dissolution of bottlenecks -and associated fluctuations in demand and capacity -affect the overall process performance. This paper presents an approach to analyze the

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... tion of process performance via a notion of Staged Process Flow (SPF). An SPF abstracts a business process as a series of queues corresponding to stages. The paper defines a number of stage characteristics and visualizations that collectively allow process performance evolution to be analyzed from multiple perspectives. The approach has been implemented in the ProM process mining framework. The paper demonstrates the advantages of the SPF approach over state-of-the-art process performance mining tools using a real-life event log of a Dutch bank.