Business Process Mining

Lecture 3: Concepts & Capabilities of

Process Mining
Course Outline
Introduction

Process performance measurement & dashboards

Process mining
• Automated process discovery
• Conformance checking
• Performance mining
• Variant analysis

Simulation and “what-if” process mining

Data extraction & preparation for process mining

Predictive process monitoring

Business case analysis & project management for process mining

Trends: prescriptive monitoring, causal process mining, robotic process mining

2
How does Process Mining work?
 Process Mining
An event log is a collection of timestamped
event records. Each event record tells us
something about the execution of a work
item (and hence a task) of the process (e.g.,
that a task has started or has been
completed), or it tells us that a given
message event, or other relevant event has
event log
occurred in the context of a given
case in the process.

4
Structure of a Business Process Event Log
Event log
Process Mining
Automated Process
Discovery discovered
process model

event log

8
Automated Process Discovery
An automated process discovery technique
takes as input an event log and produces as
output a process model that captures the Process Map
behavior of the log in a representative way. (directly follows graph)
CID Task Time Stamp …

13219 Enter Loan Application 2007-11-09 T 11:20:10 -

13219 Retrieve Applicant Data 2007-11-09 T 11:22:15 -

13220 Enter Loan Application 2007-11-09 T 11:22:40 -

13219 Compute Installments 2007-11-09 T 11:22:45 -

13219 Notify Eligibility 2007-11-09 T 11:23:00 -

13219 Approve Simple Application 2007-11-09 T 11:24:30 -

13220 Compute Installements 2007-11-09 T 11:24:35 -

BPMN process model Notify
Retrieve Rejection
Applicant
… … … … Data
Enter Loan
Application
Approve
Compute Simple
Installments Application
Notify
Eligibility
Approve
Complex
9 Application
Process Mining
Automated Process
Discovery discovered
process model

event log

Conformance
Checking
✓/

Business rules /
normative model 15
Conformance checking

Modeled process Actual process

(Expected: 8 hours) (In reality: 18 hours)
 Rule-Based Conformance Checking

•Oftentimes, we don’t have a full process model available

•Instead, we have a set of compliance rules, e.g.
• Certain tasks MUST be executed in every case
• Certain tasks can be executed at most once
• When a task A occurs, another task B must also occur (within e.g. 2 hours)
• Two tasks A and B CANNOT be executed by the same person (four-eyes
principle)

17
 Process Mining
Automated Process
Discovery discovered
process model

Performance
Mining
event log
Enhanced
process model

Conformance
Checking
✓/

Business rules /
normative model 19
Performance Mining
•Process mining tools typically support performance mining
in thee ways:
• Performance-enhanced process maps
• Dashboards
• Log animation

20
Peformance-Enhanced Process Map

Activity label
(and its duration)

Directly-follows relation between two

labels (with waiting time)
Bottleneck node
(all incoming
arcs are slow)
 Process Mining
23

Automated Process
Discovery discovered
process model

Performance Variants Analysis

Mining
event log
Enhanced Difference
process model diagnostics
event log’
Conformance
Checking
✓/

Business rules /
normative model 23
Variant Analysis
Simple cases Complex cases
Find differences in 75% 25%

performance and control-

flow between multiple
variants of a process

A process variant is a subset

of the executions of a
process corresponding to a
given product, customer,
etc.

24
Variant Analysis

In process mining tools, such as Apromore, variant analysis can be

approached as follows:
1. First, use filtering to “slice” the event log into multiple logs (one
per variant).
2. Then compre the multiple logs using:
▪Side-by-side comparison of process maps or process models
▪A comparative multi-log dashboard
▪A multi-log animation

25
Summary: Four Process Mining Capabilities

EVENT LOGS