Process Mining Techniques in Conformance Testing of Inventory Processes: An Industrial Application

Abstract

Contemporary business information systems record business events in event logs. Process mining techniques permit to explore these logs to understand and analyze processes. Although, there are a number of case studies demonstrating usefulness of process mining techniques in real-life case studies, process conformance check techniques miss such practical evaluation. Also the commercial tools have not been tested for complementarity with the widely used academic tool ProM Framework in context of conformance check. In this paper an application of process conformance check techniques in a production company is described. Using a variety of techniques, an inventory processes supported by Warehouse Management System (WMS) have been analyzed. In particular, special attention has been put on Product Management process. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the applicability of conformance check techniques to quality management in a production company. Both academic and commercial tools are used and evaluated in terms of efficiency and complementarity with each other.