You know the saying: 80% of the time and effort is spent on data preparation and only 20% on analysis. In the latest Process Mining Café, we spoke with Xixi Lu from Utrecht University about her categorization of common preprocessing tasks in process mining.

Xixi and Anne looked at all the six categories: Enriching, Integration, Filtering, Transformation, Reduction, and Abstraction. For each of the categories, we present concrete examples. So, in this episode, you get to see a lot of different types of preprocessing (see also the extensive list of pointers in the links below).

We discussed how these six categories that they distilled from their literature review align with the practical data preparation tasks we see daily. It has been a fascinating discussion. You don’t want to miss this one, especially if you are a science and terminology nerd!

You can now watch the recording here if you weren’t at the live broadcast or want to re-watch the café. A big thanks to Xixi and all of you for joining us!

Links

Here are the links that we mentioned during the session:

• Y. Liu, V. Stein Dani, I. Beerepoot, and X. Lu. Turning Logs into Lumber: Preprocessing Tasks in Process Mining, BPM Workshops (2023)

• M.L. van Eck, X. Lu, S.J.J. Leemans, W.M.P. Van Der Aalst: PM^2: A Process Mining Project Methodology. International conference on advanced information systems engineering. pp. 297–313. Springer (2015)

• S. Suriadi, R. Andrews, A.H.M. ter Hofstede, M.T. Wynn: Event log imperfection patterns for process mining: Towards a systematic approach to cleaning event logs. Information Systems 64, 132–150 (2017)

• N. Martin. Data quality in process mining. Interactive process mining in healthcare, 53-79. (2021).

• Our data quality checklist for process mining helps you to spot and fix problems with your data.

• One of the examples for the enriching category is the unfolding of case loops by adding a sequence counter column.

• Another example is the unfolding of loops for activity repetitions.

• Integration can happen in many different forms. The simplest scenario is to combine data sets of the same shape.

• Further examples can be found in the Process Mining Café about analysis transformations.

• Guideline for when to remove outliers and when to keep them.

• A.J.M.M. Weijters, W.M.P. van der Aalst, A.K. Alves De Medeiros. Process mining with the HeuristicsMiner algorithm, BETA working paper Vol. 166 (2006)

• Removing spider activities is an example of filtering noise.

• In Disco, you transform the activity or case ID configuration simply by importing your data set from a different perspective.

• Another example of transforming is the export into another event log format.

• Our data suitability checklist helps you determine whether your data set is usable for process mining in its current form.

• Sampling is often necessary for customer journey analyses.

• Another form of reduction is splitting the log into different sub-logs.

• C.W. Günther and W.M.P. van der Aalst. Fuzzy Mining – Adaptive Process Simplification Based on Multi-perspective Metrics. BPM Conference (2007)

• S.J. van Zelst, F. Mannhardt, M. de Leoni, A. Koschmider: Event Abstraction in Process Mining: Literature Review and Taxonomy. Granular Computing 6(3), 719–736 (2021)

• Our Process Mining Café with Pnina Soffer, Barbara Weber, and Francesca Zerbato about the process of process mining.

• A combination of preprocessing tasks is relabeling activity names (integration and enriching).

• D. Fahland: Extracting and Pre-Processing Event Log. CoRR abs/2211.04338 (2022)

• H.M. Marin-Castro, E. Tello-Leal: Event Log Preprocessing for Process Mining: A Review. Applied Sciences 11(22), 10556 (2021)

Contact us anytime at cafe@fluxicon.com if you have questions or suggestions for the café.

Have you seen that the Process Mining Café is also available as a podcast? So, if you prefer to listen to our episodes in your favorite podcast player, you can get them all here.

Sign up for our café mailing list and the YouTube playlist, follow Fluxicon on LinkedIn, or add the café calendar to never miss a Process Mining Café in the future.

Some preprocessing tasks can be easily done in Disco. Others require the use of data transformation tools. What are the common preprocessing tasks for process mining, and how can you group them?

We have invited Xixi Lu from Utrecht University for this month’s Process Mining Café to discuss her classification, why preprocessing is separate from data quality, and how to distinguish between noise and outliers. We get practical and show you examples. Join us!

The café takes place tomorrow, Wednesday, 13 November, at 15:00 CET (Check your timezone here). As always, you don’t need to register. Point your browser to fluxicon.com/cafe when it is time.

Sign up for the café mailing list here to receive a reminder one hour before the session starts. Or add the time to your calendar if you don’t want to miss it.

Serco is responsible for the back office processes in the marketplace systems of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) program in the United States. In this month’s Process Mining Café, we talked with Erik Scroggs and Lloyd Dugan, who have applied process mining for various use cases.

In the café, they shared three examples.

Use case No. 1: Robot efficiency

At Serco, humans and robots work together. The robotic workers take on simple tasks and hand them over to the humans for more complex activities. Erik analyzed the flow of work between robots and humans and discovered unexpected opportunities for improving their co-working setup.

Use case No. 2: Automation opportunities

How can you identify which parts of the process can be automated? Process mining helps to identify automation opportunities by providing the numbers for calculating the business case. If you have multiple ideas, these numbers will help you to validate where you get the most out of automating next.

Use case No. 3: Training paths

As a third example, Erik showed how they analyzed their training flows. Brand-new workers start with baseline training and, over time, receive more and more training badges that make them eligible to work new product lines. Based on the discovered training paths, they can now classify their production workers and make projections for the future.

Finally, we also talked about the skepticism and bad reputation that automation sometimes has. It is a reality that if robots take over simple tasks, only the knowledge work remains. So, automation is driving existing workers more into a career path. We discussed if this is a good or a bad thing.

You can now watch the recording here if you missed the live broadcast or want to re-watch the café. A big thanks to Erik and Lloyd and all of you for joining us!

Links

Here are the links that we mentioned during the session:

• Erik gave a talk at this year’s Process Mining Camp. Sign up at the camp mailing list to be notified as soon the video recording of his presentation becomes available.

• Case study at a housing association, where process mining discovered automation opportunities.

• Privacy, Security, and Ethics guide for process mining.

Contact us anytime at cafe@fluxicon.com if you have questions or suggestions for the café.

Have you seen that the Process Mining Café is also available as a podcast? So, if you prefer to listen to our episodes in your favorite podcast player, you can get them all here.

Sign up for our café mailing list and the YouTube playlist, follow Fluxicon on LinkedIn, or add the café calendar to never miss a Process Mining Café in the future.

Many companies use or plan to use some form of automation technique, for example, workflow automation, programming, or Robotic Process Automation (RPA), to reduce manual labor.

But which parts of a process can be automated, and which parts should be better kept human? Process mining helps by providing an accurate and transparent picture of the underlying process needed to make such decisions.

For tomorrow’s Process Mining Café, we have invited Erik Scroggs and Lloyd Dugan from Serco to tell us more about how they are using Disco to analyze the performance of their RPA robots, identify new automation opportunities, and analyze their training processes. Join us!

Talk process mining and automation with us tomorrow, Wednesday, 9 October, at 15:00 CEST (Check your timezone here). As always, you don’t need to register. Point your browser to fluxicon.com/cafe when it is time. You can watch the café and join the discussion while we are on the air, right there on the café website.

Sign up for the café mailing list here to receive a reminder one hour before the session starts.

Tune in live for Process Mining Café by visiting fluxicon.com/cafe on Wednesday, 9 October 2024, at 15:00 CEST! Add the time to your calendar if you don’t want to miss it.

In last week’s Process Mining Café, we talked with Mieke Jans, a professor at Hasselt University, about process mining in audit.

Auditors have different goals than process improvement teams. For example, internal auditors verify the efficiency of the process and whether it is under control. They analyze the segregation of duties, variants, and cases.

Mieke was one of the first to apply process mining in an audit setting. We talked about the benefits of using process mining as an auditor. Furthermore, we discussed two recent research works in the field.

You can now watch the recording here if you missed the live broadcast or want to re-watch the café. A big thanks to Mieke and all of you for joining us!

Links

Here are the links that we mentioned during the session:

• Mieke Jans. From Relational Database To Valuable Event Logs For Process Mining Purposes: A Procedure, 2017.

• Marzie Hosseinpour and Mieke Jans. Auditors’ Categorization of Process Deviations (Download PDF), 2024.

• Manal Laghmouch, Sebastien Lizin, Jan Mendling, Benoit Depaire, Mieke Jans. Auditors’ Risk Perception of Process Control Deficiencies: A Discrete Choice Experiment (Download PDF), 2024.

• Mieke Jans and Manal Laghmouch. Process Mining for Detailed Process Analysis, 2022.

• Example applications for process mining in audit.

Contact us anytime at cafe@fluxicon.com if you have questions or suggestions for the café.

Have you seen that the Process Mining Café is also available as a podcast? So, if you prefer to listen to our episodes in your favorite podcast player, you can get them all here.

Sign up for our café mailing list and the YouTube playlist, follow Fluxicon on LinkedIn, or add the café calendar to never miss a Process Mining Café in the future.