Behavioral and Performance Analysis of a Real-Time Case Study Event Log: A Process Mining Approach

Abstract

Project-based organizations need to procure different commodities, and the failure/success of a project depends heavily on procurement management. Companies must refine and develop methods to simplify and optimize the procurement process in a highly competitive environment. This paper presents a methodology to help managers of project-based organizations analyze procurement processes to determine the optimal framework for simultaneously addressing multiple objectives. These goals include minimizing the time between the generation and required approval for a purchase, identifying unnamed activities, and allocating the budget efficiently. In this paper, we apply process mining algorithms to a dataset consisting of event logs on Oracle Financials-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) procurement processes in ERP systems and demonstrate interesting results leading to project procurement intelligence (PPI). The provided log data is the real-life data consisting of 180,462 events referring to seven activities within 43,101 cases. The logged procurement processes are filtered and analyzed using the open-source process mining frameworks PrOM and Disco. As a result of the process mining activities, a simulation of the discovered process model derived from the event log of the entire procurement process is presented, and the most frequent potential behaviors are identified. This analysis and extraction of frequent processes from corporate event logs help organizations understand, adapt, and redesign procurement operations and, most importantly, make them more efficient and of higher quality. This study shows that after the successful formulation of guiding principles, data refinement, and process structure optimization, the case study results are considered significant by the organization’s management.