Discovering Interacting Artifacts from ERP Systems

Abstract

The omnipresence of using Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to support business processes has enabled recording a great amount of (relational) data which contains information about the behaviors of these processes. Various process mining techniques have been proposed to analyze recorded information about process executions. However, classic process mining techniques generally require a linear event log as input and not a multi-dimensional relational database used by ERP systems. Much research has been conducted into converting a relational data source into an event log. Most conversion approaches found in literature usually assume a clear notion of a case and a unique case identifier in an isolated process. This assumption does not hold in ERP systems where processes comprise the life-cycles of various interrelated data objects, instead of a single process. In this paper, a new semi-automatic approach is presented to discover from the plain database of an ERP system the various objects supporting the system. More precisely, we identify an artifact-centric process model describing the system's objects, their life-cycles, and detailed information about how the various objects synchronize along their life-cycles, called interactions. In addition, our artifact-centric approach helps to eliminate ambiguous dependencies in discovered models caused by the data divergence and convergence problems and to identify the exact "abnormal flows". The presented approach is implemented and evaluated on two processes of ERP systems through case studies.

Guided Interaction Exploration and Performance Analysis in Artifact-Centric Process Models

“…Several approaches have also been developed to take an object-oriented or artifact-centric view of process mining (van der Aalst et al 2001;Popova et al 2015). However, the number of techniques that can automatically discover the interactions between artifact models is limited (Lu et al 2015;van Eck et al 2016b). …”

“…Like in monolithic process discovery, it is possible to establish causal dependencies between events that occur in different artifacts (Lu et al 2015). It is also possible to link a stage in one artifact lifecycle to stages in related artifact lifecycles by discovering synchronisation conditions (Popova and Dumas 2013).…”

“…Understanding the relations between artifacts and their effect on the overall process behaviour is a challenge (Lu et al 2015). For complex processes this requires the analysis of large numbers of possible artifact interactions, many of which are not interesting.…”

“…Recently, it has become possible to automatically discover models for process artifacts and their behavioural interactions (Lu et al 2015;van Eck et al 2016b;Popova et al 2015). These techniques produce individual process models for each artifact, similar to traditional process discovery approaches.…”

“…There are different ways to interpret the interaction of artifacts (Lu et al 2015;van Eck et al 2016b;Popova and Dumas 2013). We are interested in finding implications that given the occurrence of a state or activity related to one artifact-lifecycle provide information on the possible behaviour of other artifacts.…”