Building Conformance-Aware Workflows in Enterprise Systems

Conformance checking is often treated as a post-hoc audit function — you run it on historical logs to understand what happened. Meridian takes a different view: conformance should be part of the operational loop, not a retrospective report.

How conformance checking works

At its core, conformance checking compares an observed process execution (event log) against a reference model (process model). The degree of fit is expressed as a conformance score between 0 and 1.

// Conformance score computation (simplified)
function computeConformance(trace: Event[], model: ProcessModel): number {
  const alignment = computeAlignment(trace, model)
  const deviationCost = alignment.moves.filter(
    m => m.type !== 'synchronous'
  ).length
  const maxCost = trace.length + model.transitions.length
  return 1 - deviationCost / maxCost
}

Designing conformance-aware workflows

The key insight is to treat your reference model as a first-class operational artifact — version-controlled, reviewed, and maintained alongside your procedures and automation rules.

• —Version your process models alongside your code in source control
• —Set conformance thresholds per process, not globally — invoice processing tolerates less deviation than employee onboarding
• —Use variant analysis to distinguish structural deviations (wrong path) from timing deviations (right path, wrong speed)
• —Instrument your automation to emit events that feed back into the conformance engine for closed-loop measurement