=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2673/paperDR01
|storemode=property
|title=Celonis Process Repository: A Bridge between Business Process Management and Process Mining
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2673/paperDR01.pdf
|volume=Vol-2673
|authors=Peyman Badakhshan,Jerome Geyer-Klingeberg,Muhammad El-Halaby,Thomas Lutzeyer,Gabriela Vianna Lembo Affonseca
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/bpm/BadakhshanGELA20
}}
==Celonis Process Repository: A Bridge between Business Process Management and Process Mining==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2673/paperDR01.pdf
Celonis Process Repository: A Bridge between Business
Process Management and Process Mining
Peyman Badakhshan, Jerome Geyer-Klingeberg, Muhammad El-Halaby, Thomas
Lutzeyer, Gabriela Vianna Lembo Affonseca
Celonis SE, Munich, Germany
{p.badakhshan, j.geyerklingeberg}@celonis.com
Abstract. Process Mining disrupted Business Process Management (BPM) in
various ways from process modeling to analysis, redesigning, implementing, and
monitoring of processes. One of the big challenges of traditional ways to identify
and discover process models are the very time consuming and costly procedures
due to lengthy interviews and workshops that result in a conceptual model and
not representing the real executed process (As-Is process). Process Repository is
a recently developed toolset by Celonis that brings BPM and Process Mining
closer together by providing process documentation capabilities and fully inte-
grating them with Process Mining applications.
Keywords: Process Repository, Process Documentation, Process Mining, BPM
1 Introduction
Process Mining is a technology as well as a research discipline that connects the data
world and process world to support fact-driven process management [1]. The main re-
search efforts in Process Mining focus on the development of new discovery algo-
rithms, conformance checking, analytics features [2], and deriving process actions and
recommendations from data [3]. While research connects Business Process Manage-
ment (BPM) and Process Mining [4,5,6,7], there is still a gap between both disciplines
when it comes to process mining and BPM tools and there only a few tool-based ap-
proaches to combine both disciplines [8]. Integrated process documentation capabilities
are one of the important elements to bridge the gap between BPM and Process Mining.
We conducted nine semi-structured interviews with customers and partners of Celo-
nis to better understand the pain points regarding the integration of BPM and Process
Mining. One of the main pain points that the interviewees mentioned is the energy and
time needed for training and onboarding of new joiners on how processes are performed
and that the information sometimes gets lost in different parts of the organization. Sim-
ilarly, the interviewees mentioned a lack of a single source of truth for maintaining
process-related information including organizational process architecture with its pro-
cess flows and attributes, such as process owners and supporting documents. Addition-
ally, proper integration between process modeling and Process Mining are often miss-
ing. This hinders the usage of process models on the Process Mining side, e.g., for
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons
License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
P. Badakhshan, J. Geyer-Klingeberg, M. El-Halaby, T. Lutzeyer, G. Lembo
compliance use cases. It also inhibits the avoidance of time-consuming interviews and
workshops for process modeling and taking advantage of mining capabilities.
To overcome process documentation challenges and take one step ahead to fill the
gap between BPM and Process Mining, we present a new capability in the Celonis In-
telligent Business Cloud: The Process Repository. Process Repository connects the As-
Is world with the To-Be world by making process documentation easy and accessible
for Process Mining users and Process Managers who need both functionalities. The
repository aims at creating an integrated and centralized environment for documenting
and maintaining business processes, analyzing their process performance and conform-
ance, as well as providing the possibility for integration with BPM tools.
The remainder is structured as follows. Section 2 describes the overview of the new
features and their benefits. Section 3 demonstrates the tool, and Section 4 concludes.1,2
2 Innovations and Main Characteristics
Process Repository is a product service that is inspired by a series of interviews among
nine Celonis customers. The toolset has then been developed in a co-innovation project
between Celonis and one customer, which is a +50,000-employee sized organization in
the Chemical industry. After development, the product was tested by multiple organi-
zations in the manufacturing & production and healthcare industry.
The features of Process Repository allow creating a process architecture by defining
process categories, identifying names and descriptions of each category, and identify-
ing process attributes, such as the process owner, necessary links, attachments of sup-
porting documents (e.g., guidelines, policies, etc.). It enables tracking of all applied
changes on different parts of process categories. For instance, it is shown in which time
different users made changes in different sections, such as attributes and process mod-
els. It also enables easy communication among employees through commenting. Users
can upload their designed process models in the BPMN 2.0 format or process flow
images. Processes can also be modelled out of the box or adjusted using a process mod-
eler. It is possible to monitor all versions of each process and track the changes that
happened over time. Furthermore, each process model can be specified by adding tag
groups for instance for different plants or business sections.
The benefits of Process Repository can be summarized into three categories: Inte-
gration & Consistency, Collaboration, and Compliance & Standardization.
Integration & Consistency. Process Repository provides seamless integration and
consistency from two perspectives. First, it provides integration with Process Mining
(Celonis Process Analytics) to send and receive process models mined from the actual
event data. By providing public APIs, it also enables all BPM tools to integrate their
process models and use them directly in Celonis Intelligent Business Cloud. Second, it
improves consistency by gathering all process-related information in one place that can
be used for instance for training purposes.
1 Step-by-step guide and documentation: https://bit.ly/393hNQa
2 Video tutorial: https://bit.ly/2ZtXqs8
Celonis Process Repository: A Bridge between BPM and Process Mining
Collaboration. Process Repository increases collaboration by enabling all employ-
ees with different responsibilities to view and follow processes. Users can communicate
with each other and will always be updated about process changes.
Compliance & Standardization. Process Repository enables process modeling to
define target process models that can be used in Process Mining, which supports Con-
formance Checking. Documents such as internal audit reports can be stored for each
process category for more transparency.
3 Tool Demonstration
Process Repository consists of four main sections including Home, Categories, At-
tributes, and Process Models. The Home Screen shows updates on all categories and
allows you to directly select a specific category level. Categories section enables the
creation of a process architecture to represent how organizational processes are classi-
fied at different category levels (defining process structure). The Attributes (Fig. 1) and
Process Models sections (Fig. 2) allow to maintain the process related information.
Fig. 1. Attributes section
Fig. 2. Process Models section
P. Badakhshan, J. Geyer-Klingeberg, M. El-Halaby, T. Lutzeyer, G. Lembo
As mentioned in the introduction, one of the main benefits of Process Mining is to
avoid long interviews for designing conceptual process models. However, documenta-
tion of the discovered models remains a challenge of tools, as Process Mining and BPM
require closer integration. Process Repository enables documentation of process mod-
els from Process Analytics, for instance from the Celonis Variant Explorer or within
the Conformance Checker.
After mining the process in the Celonis Conformance Checker, the process model
can be saved in the Process Repository by identifying the desired category level and
process model. Having all process models stored in the same platform as the Process
Mining application, it is now easy to retrieve process models from the Process Reposi-
tory as the capability is integrated, e.g., in the Conformance Checker and compare the
model against the discovered process to detect process violation (Fig. 3).
Fig. 3. Options to define target (To-Be) models for Conformance Checking
In the following, we shortly explain three use cases of Process Repository in the Ce-
lonis Intelligent Business Cloud.
Use Case 1. Users claimed that they have their process models and their assets, such
as guidelines and training material, in unstructured folders and the process architecture
is not clear, representative, and accessible. Therefore, various challenges occur, such
as time-consuming onboarding of new joiners and updates regarding changes of each
process category. Process Repository capabilities allow maintaining all materials and
process-related information in one integrated environment with easy access.
Use Case 2. Users claimed that they need to integrate their Process Mining technology
with their BPM tools to bring the designed process models to the process mining envi-
ronment, reuse them any time needed for conformance checking, and avoid manual
uploads.
Use Case 3. Users claimed that they do not want to spend time on out-of-the-box
process modeling and rather take the advantage of mining capabilities and document
the models as the base for defining To-Be models. For this use case, users start from
the Process Analytics application in Celonis. They either check the Variant Explorer
directly, select the variants, export to BPMN 2.0, and then save the model in the Re-
pository. In the Conformance Checker in the Process Analytics, where users mine the
Celonis Process Repository: A Bridge between BPM and Process Mining
target process, they can select the desired variants, check the section edit process model,
directly save the model in the repository by defining the category level and process
model level. If the user has specific permissions, they can overwrite the existing model
(keeping the versions) or create a new process model.
4 Conclusion
Process Repository is a service that is developed in a joint project of Celonis and its
customers, it serves the goal of improving the integration between BPM and Process
Mining. The features are fully available in the Celonis Intelligent Business Cloud and
actively used by Celonis customers. For example, in one organization, Process Repos-
itory is currently rolled out among 2000 employees for Process Documentation, Con-
formance Checking, onboarding new joiners, and better organizational collaboration
for process related topics.
A detailed step-by-step guide and description of Process Repository is available in a
separate file to the 18th International Conference on Business Process Management
(BPM 2020). Educators, researchers and students can use Process Repository for free
via the academic license of the Celonis Intelligent Business Cloud.3
5 References
1. van der Aalst, W., & Damiani, E. (2015). Processes meet big data: Connecting data science
with process science. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, 8(6), 810-819.
2. dos Santos Garcia, C., Meincheim, A., Junior, E. R. F., Dallagassa, M. R., Sato, D. M. V.,
Carvalho, D. R., ... & Scalabrin, E. E. (2019). Process mining techniques and applications-
A systematic mapping study. Expert Systems with Applications.
3. Badakhshan, P., Bernhart, G., Geyer-Klingeberg, J., Nakladal, J., Schenk, S., & Vogelge-
sang, T. (2019a). The Action Engine–Turning Process Insights into Action. In: Proceedings
of International Conference on Process Mining Demo Track, Aachen, Germany.
4. Badakhshan, P., Conboy, K., Grisold, T. and vom Brocke, J. (2019b), "Agile business pro-
cess management: A systematic literature review and an integrated framework", Business
Process Management Journal, Forthcoming.
5. van Der Aalst, W. M. (2011, April). Process mining: discovering and improving Spaghetti
and Lasagna processes. In 2011 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Data
Mining (CIDM), 1-7.
6. van der Aalst, W. M., Netjes, M., & Reijers, H. A. (2007). Supporting the full BPM lifecycle
using process mining and intelligent redesign. In Contemporary issues in database design
and information systems development, 100-132.
7. Lamghari, Z., Radgui, M., Saidi, R., & Rahmani, M. D. (2019). Defining business process
improvement metrics based on BPM life cycle and process mining techniques. International
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3 https://www.celonis.com/academic-signup