Process Mining - Overview

Overview

Process mining techniques are often used when no formal description of the process can be obtained by other approaches, or when the quality of an existing documentation is questionable. For example, the audit trails of a workflow management system, the transaction logs of an enterprise resource planning system, and the electronic patient records in a hospital can be used to discover models describing processes, organizations, and products. Moreover, such event logs can also be used to compare event logs with some prior model to see whether the observed reality conforms to some prescriptive or descriptive model.

Contemporary management trends such as BAM (Business Activity Monitoring), BOM (Business Operations Management), BPI (business process intelligence) illustrate the interest in supporting the diagnosis functionality in the context of Business Process Management technology (e.g., Workflow Management Systems but also other process-aware information systems).