Object-Centric Processes are a new way to look at processes: instead understanding a process execution as a sequence of isolated steps in a monolithic case, an object-centric process describes how its activities work on the various involved and related objects over time. This idea of describing processes as emerging from an interplay of changes to related objects has been discussed and developed in the BPM and Process Mining research community for many years. It (finally) became visible to a broad audience at Celonis’ Celosphere 2022 event where Object-Centric Process Mining (OCPM) took center ..read more

dfahland The process mining landscape is evolving rapidly – both in industry and in research. But our education has not kept up. The “(still) very successful “original” Process Mining MOOC Process Mining in Action has been extremely successful in teaching the foundations of Process Mining to a broad audience of practitioners, students, and researchers aiming to get familiar with the field. Since then, many new courses covering Process Mining have become available, both from vendors and the Covid-enabled video recordings of BPM and Process Mining courses uploaded to Youtube. What is sorely ..read more

This post summarizes my talk on “Data Storage vs Data Semantics for Object-Centric Event Data” I gave at the XES symposium at the ICPM 2022 conference. I first provide a bit of background and the problem we faced, before I turn to the issue of separating data storage from data semantics. Background Process Mining analysis starts when someone made event data available in a form that can be directly loaded into a process mining solution. Providing data suitable for analysis is a very labor-intensive process in itself, often taking the lion share of time until the first insights are obtained. Eve ..read more

Also this year, we are organizing the 3rd International workshop on Event Data and Behavioral Analytics (EdbA’22) at the ICPM’22. Part of our workshop philosophy is to dedicate half of the time to open discussions on the topics of the workshop. The discussion often turns to what makes the problems we are looking at difficult – and it’s usually hidden assumptions and under-researched topics. The second and third session on “Deviation Analysis” and “…beyond Control-Flow” surfaced the following topics (for which I managed to record a few short bullet points and questions). See also The hidden ass ..read more

Classical event logs have the fundamental shortcoming of describing process behavior only in isolated process executions from the viewpoint of a single case entity. Most real-life processes involve multiple entities and process executions are not isolated but tightly connected – through actors and entities involved in multiple executions. This post summarizes how event graphs are a better model to describe and query such dynamics. I explain the basic ideas and how to construct a graph from an ordinary event table. By Dirk Fahland. Classical event logs – the basis for all process mining – use a ..read more

Process Mining over multiple perspectives, dimensions, objects, entities, abstraction levels, etc. is gaining a lot of attention in the process mining field in 2021. If you want to learn more about the emerging topics in Multi… Process Mining, this short guide has you covered for the workshop day (1st Nov 2021) of the 3rd International Conference on Process Mining 2021 in Eindhoven https://icpmconference.org/2021/. By Dirk Fahland I may have missed a talk. I made this overview is to the best of my understanding of the various announcements or prior knowledge on the presenters’ works. Let me kn ..read more

By Dirk Fahland. Here is a list of activites by the Process Mining vendors at ICPM that I have seen in the program that – in my view – will have a relation or show use cases for Multi… Process Mining. ABBYY, Thursday, October 8 – 12:30h: “Logistics – Application of process intelligence beyond one system of record” Celonis, Thursday, October 8 – 13:00 “Language for Processes” (Celonis’ process query language inevitably will touch on looking beyond event data in a trace). 15:45h: “New Teaching Case Studies for Process Mining in Audit and Accounting”. Possibly also Celonis’ Process Query EY, Thu ..read more

By Dirk Fahland. Analyzing processes supported by an ERP system such as Order-to-Cash or Purchase-to-Pay are one of the most frequent use cases of process mining. At the same time, they are one of the most challenging, because the processes operate on multiple related data objects such as orders, invoices, and deliveries in n:m relations. Event log extraction for process mining alays flattens the relational structures into a sequences of events. The top part of the following poster illustrates what goes wrong during this kind of event log extraction: events are duplicated and false behavioral ..read more

By Dirk Fahland. In this post, I show how simple data visualizations help understanding the multi-dimensional nature of processes. Even the most simple classical business processes have important dynamics that cannot be understood by cases in isolation. The Performance Spectrum was originally designed to deliver a useful process map for analyzing logistics processes over time. When applying the same technique to business process event data, the performance spectrum proves equally useful as it unveils process characteristics that were so far hidden by existing process mining tools: performance ..read more

Dirk Fahland One of the core challenges of process analytics from event data is to enable an analyst to get a comprehensive understanding of the process and where problems reside. In business process mining such an overview is obtained with a process map. It can be discovered from event data to visualize the flow in the process and highlight deviations and bottlenecks. Process maps of logistics processes do not give these insights: they are too large to comprehend, the maps do not visualize how processing of materials influences each other, and – as they show an aggregate of all event data – t ..read more