Conformance checking and discovery of information service request process

Abstract

Process mining is a form of business process analysis. The approach could support organizations in retrieving structured process information by using recorded process data to discover, monitor and improve the processes. In this work, the process mining technology is applied for conformance checking and discovering an organization’s Information Service Request process in reality as a case study. Currently, the reference model was drawn as a simple flow using Microsoft Word. The proposed method starts with writing a VBA script to extract traces from the drawing that enables the generation of XES file used for modeling the reference process in Petri net which is an executable process modeling notation. Based on the collected event logs, the actual process is investigated to identify the deviations from the reference process model. The open-source ProM with the plug-in Disco and Inductive visual Miner is utilized for verification such as detecting bottlenecks, as well as performance analysis with additional perspectives such as social network graph. The findings would benefit further improvement of the organization’s business process. In addition, compared to the previously simple workflow created from Microsoft Drawing, the presented approach facilitates modeling the organization’s reference process with the standard BPMN notation generated from the XES file.