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Business Process Mining: An Industrial Application
W.M.P. van der Aalst1 , H.A. Reijers1 , A.J.M.M. Weijters1 , B.F. van Dongen1 , A.K. Alves de Medeiros1 , M. Song2,1 , and H.M.W. Verbeek1
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Department of Technology Management, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, NL-5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. w.m.p.v.d.aalst@tm.tue.nl 2 Dept. of Industrial Engineering, PohangUniversity of Science and Technology, San 31 Hyoja-Dong, Nam-gu, Pohang, 790-784, South Korea.

Abstract. Contemporary information systems (e.g., WFM, ERP, CRM, SCM, and B2B systems) record business events in so-called event logs. Business process mining takes these logs to discover process, control, data, organizational, and social structures. Although many researchers are developing new and morepowerful process mining techniques and software vendors are incorporating these in their software, few of the more advanced process mining techniques have been tested on real-life processes. This paper describes the application of process mining in one of the provincial offices of the Dutch national public works department, responsible for the construction and maintenance of the road and waterinfrastructure. Using a variety of process mining techniques, we analyzed the processing of invoices sent by the various subcontractors and suppliers from three different perspectives: (1) the process perspective, (2) the organizational perspective and (3) the case perspective. For this purpose, we used some of the tools developed in the context of the ProM framework. The goal of this paper is todemonstrate the applicability of process mining in general and our algorithms and tools in particular. Key words: Process mining, social network analysis, workflow management, business process management, business process analysis, data mining, Petri nets.

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Introduction

Today, many enterprise information systems store relevant events in some structured form. For example, workflow management systemstypically register the start and completion of activities [2]. ERP systems like SAP log all transactions, e.g., users filling out forms, changing documents, etc. Business-to-business (B2B) systems log the exchange of messages with other parties. Call center packages but also general-purpose CRM systems log interactions with customers. These examples show that many systems have some kind of eventlog often referred to as “history”, “audit trail”, “transaction log”, etc. [5, 8, 19, 39]. The event log typically contains information about events referring to an activity and a case. The case (also named process instance) is the “thing” which is being handled, e.g., a customer order, a job application, an insurance claim, a building permit,

etc. The activity (also named task, operation,action, or work-item) is some operation on the case. Typically, events have a timestamp indicating the time of occurrence. Moreover, when people are involved, event logs will characteristically contain information on the person executing or initiating the event, i.e., the performer. Besides the availability of event logs there is an increased interest in monitoring business processes. On the one hand,new legislation such as the SarbanesOxley (SOX) Act [38] and increased emphasis on corporate governance is forcing organizations to follow their business activities more closely [22]. On the other hand, there is a constant pressure to improve the performance and efficiency of business processes. This requires more fine-grained monitoring facilities as is illustrated by today’s buzzwords such as BAM(Business Activity Monitoring), BOM (Business Operations Management), and BPI (Business Process Intelligence). However, the functionality offered by tools such as Cognos and BusinessObjects is limited to simple performance indicators such as flow time and utilization. Unfortunately, most of these systems do not focus on causal and dynamic dependencies in processes and organizations. One of the few...