About this course

Summary
• This course gives an introduction to process mining techniques, including
automated process discovery, conformance checking, performance analysis,
business rules mining, and predictive process monitoring. In order to develop a
mastery of these techniques, we will introduce concrete tools and we will apply
these tools to answer business questions using real-life datasets.

Related courses
• Business Process Management
• Broad introduction to the art and science of managing business processes
• Business data analytics
• Techniques for customer analytics, product analytics and related questions
• Business Analysis
• Identifying and analyzing business problems and opportunities that can be
addressed via IT solutions
2
Structure of the course

13 lecture+practice sessions covering:

• Automated Process Discovery
• Conformance and Performance Mining
• Analysis of process variants
• What-if analysis
• Predictive Process Monitoring
Team Project
• Analysis of a real-life dataset and questions posed by a
business user
• Weekly progress review sessions
3
 Readings and resources
•Course material posted on course Web page

marwa.abdelaziz@sadatacademy.edu.eg

• References
• Dumas, La Rosa, Mendling & Reijers: Fundamentals of Business Process
Management (second edition), Springer 2018 (chapters 1, 6, 7, 11)
What is a Business Process?

6
 Issue
delivery Package
receipt Load products Issue
truck invoice

Prepare
shipment Schedule Schedule
payment Check &
delivery
confirm
PO
Unload
truck
Notify
shipment
Obtain
PO
confirm.
Match
Check incoming
Request
Invoice payment
PO change

7
Business processes
Business processes
Business processes
 Check &
PO Package Load Notify Issue Match Payment
confirm
received products truck shipment invoice payment made
PO

Obtain Issue
PO Schedule Unload Check Schedule Goods
PO delivery
issued delivery truck invoice payment arrived
confirm. receipt

9
A business process is…
a chain of events, activities and decisions
...involving a number of actors and objects,
….triggered by a need
and leading to an outcome that is of value to a customer.

Examples:
• Order-to-Cash
• Procure-to-Pay (aka Purchase-to-Pay)
• Application-to-Approval
• Issue-to-Resolution

10
❑ Events correspond to things that happen atomically, which means that they have no
duration. The arrival of a piece of equipment at a construction site is an event. This event
may trigger the execution of a series of activities. For example, when a piece of
equipment arrives, the site engineer inspects it. This inspection is an activity, in the sense
that it takes time.

❑ In addition to events and activities, a typical process includes decision points, that is,
points in time when a decision is made that affects the way the process is executed. For
example, as a result of the inspection, the site engineer may decide that the equipment
should be returned or that the equipment should be accepted. This decision affects what
happens later in the process.
➢ Order-to-cash. This is a type of process performed by a vendor, which starts when a customer submits an order to
purchase a product or a service and ends when the product or service in question has been delivered to the customer
and the customer has made the corresponding payment. An order-to-cash process encompasses activities related to
purchase order verification, shipment (for physical products), delivery, invoicing, payment receipt, and
acknowledgment.

➢ Procure-to-pay. This type of process starts when someone in an organization determines that a given product or
service needs to be purchased. It ends when the product or service has been delivered and paid for. A procure-to-pay
process includes activities such as obtaining quotes, approving the purchase, selecting a supplier, issuing a purchase
order, receiving the goods (or consuming the service), and paying the invoice.

➢ Application-to-approval. This type of process starts when someone applies for a benefit or privilege and ends when
the benefit or privilege in question is either granted or denied. This type of process is common in government
agencies, for example when citizens apply for building permits or when entrepreneurs apply for business licenses
(e.g., to open a restaurant). Another process that falls into this category is the admissions process in a university,
which starts when a student applies for admission into a degree program. Yet another example is the process for
approval of vacation or special leave requests in a company.

➢ Issue-to-resolution. This type of process starts when a customer raises a problem or issue, such as a complaint
related to a defect in a product or an issue encountered when consuming a service. The process continues until the
customer, the supplier, or preferably both of them agree that the issue has been resolved. A variant of this process
can be found in insurance companies that
Exercise 1.1 Consider the following process for the admission of international graduate students at a university.
In order to apply for admission, students first fill in an online form. Online applications are recorded in an information system to
which all staff members involved in the admissions process have access. After a student has submitted the online form, a PDF
document is generated and the student is requested to download it, sign it, and send it by post together with the required
documents, which include:
• certified copies of previous degree and academic transcripts,
• results of English language test,
• curriculum vitae,
• two reference letters.
When these documents are received by the admissions office, an officer checks the completeness of the documents. If any
document is missing, an email is sent to the student.
The student has to send the missing documents by post. Assuming the application is complete, the admissions office sends the
certified copies of the degrees to an academic recognition agency, which checks the degrees and gives an assessment of their
validity and equivalence in terms of local education standards. This agency requires that all documents be sent to it by post, and
that all documents be certified copies of the originals. The agency sends back its assessment to the university by post as well.
Assuming the degree verification is successful, the English language test results are then checked online by an officer at the
admissions office. If the validity of the English language test results cannot be verified, the application is rejected (such
notifications of rejection are sent by email).
Once all documents of a given student have been validated, the admissions office forwards these documents by internal mail to the
corresponding academic committee responsible for deciding whether to offer admission or not. The committee makes its decision
based on the academic degrees and transcripts, the CV, and the reference letters. The committee meets once every three months to
examine all applications that are ready for academic assessment at the time of the meeting.
At the end of the committee meeting, the chair of the committee notifies the admissions office of the selection outcomes. This
notification includes a list of admitted and rejected candidates. A few days later, the admissions office notifies the outcome to each
candidate via email. Additionally, successful candidates are sent a confirmation letter by post.
1. Who are the actors in this process?
Admissions officer, applicant, academic recognition agency, and academic
committee.

2. Which actors can be considered as customers in this process?

The applicant.

3. What value does the process deliver to its customers?

the process delivers value whether the applicant is accepted or rejected, provided
that the application is processed in due order. Another viewpoint would be to say
that the process only gives value to the applicant if the application is accepted,
and not if it is rejected.
4. What are the possible outcomes of this process?

Applicant rejected due to incomplete documents;

Applicant rejected due to English language test results;
Applicant rejected due to assessment of academic recognition agency;
Applicant rejected due to academic committee decision;
Applicant accepted.
A more in-depth analysis could reveal other possible outcomes such as “Application
withdrawn by applicant” or “Applicant conditionally accepted subject to providing
additional documents”.
“My washing machine doesn’t work…”
Negative outcomes (value- Positive outcomes (value-adding):
reducing): • Fault repaired immediately with
• Fault not repaired in a timely minor intervention
manner • Fault repaired, covered by
• Fault repaired but customer pays warranty
more than expected

Insurance
Call Centre Company
Technician

Customer Customer
Par ts
Service Store
Dispatch
Centre

VALUE
issue-to-resolution process 11
What is Business Process
Management (BPM)?

12
 BPM – A Discipline for Improving Performance
Business Environment
Economy Regulatory Culture

Assets & Organisation

Resources
Performance Planning Performance Management Stakeholders
Financial

Value
Human Function A Function B Function C
Resources
Business Pro cess
Technology
Business Pro cess Customers
Materials
Business Process

Competitors
Rummler’s Framework 13
Process performance

If you had to choose between two services, you would

typically choose the one that is:

•F…
•C…
•B…
Process performance
• Before starting to analyze any process in detail, it is important
to clearly define the process performance measures that will
be used to determine whether a process is in good shape or
in bad shape.

• If you had to choose between two services, you would

typically choose the one that is:

•Faster
•Cheaper
•Better
Process performance

Three dimensions of process performance

•Time
•Cost
•Quality
Improving process performance

Customer Greet & Take Bring Serve Present Issue Customer

arrived seat order menu meal bill invoice paid

17
How would you improve this process?
Outsource to Customer Standardize
Eliminate Cooking

Automate

Invest and Build

Re-sequence

Eliminate Waiters

18
Business Process Management (BPM)

Body of principles, methods and tools to design, analyze,

execute and monitor business processes, with the aim of
improving their performance.

≈
IT systems
Customers Employees

Business
Processes
Trading
Data
Partners

IT infrastructure Suppliers

19
What is Process Mining?

20
What is Process Mining?
• Organizations use enterprise systems to support their business
operations, including:
• ERP systems that support production, delivery or payroll processes
• CRM systems that support marketing, sales or customer service processes.
• These systems record data that about the processes they support,
including order-to-cash, purchase-to-pay, etc.
• Process Mining is a family of techniques that use data recorded by
enterprise systems to discover and analyze the business processes
supported by these systems, in order to identify performance and
conformance issues, trace down their root causes, and find
optimization opportunities.
 How does Process Mining work?
01 The systems supporting the execution of the
business process are configured to record events
Process Logging capturing the execution of tasks in the process

02
This business process execution data needs to be
transformed into “Event Logs”. Correct time-
Data Collection
stamps and descriptions are essential.

03
The data is extracted and prepared by data
Data Preparation engineers (IT side) based on business
requirements

04
Automated process discovery and other types of
analysis can then be used to discover and
Process Mining
analyze the process.
Event log
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, escalation event, or other relevant event has occurred in the context of a given
case in the process.
Process Mining
Process Mining
An automated process discovery technique takes as
input an event log and produces as output a process
model that captures the behavior of the log in a
representative way.
Process Mining
Performance Mining
Performance mining techniques take as input a process model and an event log and produce as output an enhanced process
model. The enhanced process model contains additional elements (e.g., color-coded elements) that can answer questions like:
“Why is the process slow?”, or “Where do we waste the largest amount of time in a business process?” In other words, they can
pinpoint the bottlenecks that slow down the process. Note that the process model used for performance mining might be a process
model provided by the analyst or an automatically-discovered one.
Process Mining
Conformance Checking
Conformance checking techniques take as input an event log and a process model,
and they give us as output a list of differences between the process model and the
event log. For example, the process model might tell us that after executing a task
called A, we must execute a task called B. But maybe in the event log, sometimes
after task A, we do not see task B. Real process (as-is)
Modeled process (to-be) Actual duration: 5 days, max: 12 days
Expected duration: 2 days
Process Mining
Variant Analysis

variants analysis techniques take as input two event logs (corresponding to two variants of a
process) and produce as output a list of differences. Typically, one of the event logs contains all
the cases that end up in a positive outcome according to some criterion, while the other log
contains all the cases that end up in a negative outcome. For example, the first log may contain
all cases where the customer was satisfied, while the second one contains all cases that led to a
complaint. Or the first log may contain all cases where the process completed on time, while
the second one contains the delayed cases. Variants analysis techniques help their users to
diagnose the reasons why an execution of a business process sometimes does not end up in a
desirable outcome.
Process Mining?
Predictive Process Monitoring

How likely is it that a running process will

become “deviant”?

Will it end up in aWill it fail to meet its Will it generate

SLAs in the next 24 abnormal effort,
negative outco me?
hours? costs or rework?
Structure of the Course
Week 2: Performance Measurement & Dashboards

Process
mining

Automated Conformance Performance Variant Predictive

discovery Checking Mining analysis monitoring

Weeks 3-4 Week 5 Week 6 Week 7-8 Week 10-12

Week 9: Extract-Transform-Load for Process Mining

Week 13: Business Case Analysis & Project Mngt for Process Mining