Seeing and Understanding Process Ecosystems: A Case Study on Conference Submission Handling

Process mining traditionally focuses on individual processes, prioritizing case-level control flow and performance. Yet many organizations operate process ecosystems: collections of interrelated processes sharing resources, schedules and goals. This paper explores how visual analytics can support interactive analysis of such ecosystems. Using scientific conference management as a case study, we characterize submission handling as a multi-instance, multi-actor, multi-phase ecosystem. We derive representative analysis tasks and present a prototypical visual analytics system combining temporally aligned overview and detailed visualizations to reveal bottlenecks, actor workloads, and delays across concurrent processes. Using a realistic synthetic event log, we demonstrate ecosystem-level analysis and discuss design implications for visual process analytics.