-Complex processes nowadays are analyzed and improved with process mining software. Despite the high analytics quality of commercial tools like MEHRWERK ProcessMining (MPM), process mining projects often face a substantial problem: the need to determine one case identifier to align all events into one process variant. This ”one case notion” complicates projects as it does not adhere to reality. Object-centric process mining (OCPM) relaxes the ”one case notion” and allows the definition of process instances by objects that interact with each other. Due to this, OCPM represents processes more realistically. Commercial tools need to fully implement the concept of OCPM into their software functionalities to make its advantages of complexity reduction, simplification of data and event log modeling and thus gained understanding available to a vast group of industrial users. Therefore, the software MPM is extended with OCPM and proposes first approaches to handle topics like conformance checking, inter-object influence, or object-attribute analysis. Index Terms-Object-Centric Process Mining (OCPM), Conformance Checking, MEHRWERK ProcessMining (MPM)
The motivation to overcome the problems of traditional
process mining originates from the work of Wil van der Aalst
[
MPM is (to our knowledge) the first self-service business intelligence based process mining tool to include OCPM as a feature. A strong advantage is that it is based on the Qlik © Sense platform with its associative engine which provides an intuitive way of analyzing (multi-object) processes which is shown in a collection of case studies1.
The demo application created with the OCPM-data set
”running example”2 is provided for testing purposes. The
mentioned data set was chosen to allow comparison with
other approaches, such as [
Following the idea of OCPM, it is no longer necessary
to determine one case ID for several objects that interact in
1https://mpm-processmining.com/en/casestudy-access-en/
2https://github.com/Javert899/pm4py-mdl/blob/master/example logs/mdl/
mdl-running-example.mdl
a process instance. In a traditional event log, each event is
related to one activity, one timestamp, and one case (i.e., a
process instance). Taking a look at the example of a customer
order given by van der Aalst [
Taking the order as case ID, the process step of ”picking the item” will occur for every item in the order. 2) Duplicated events lead to skewed process performance indicators such as the number of process steps or automation rates, if not carefully modeled. If the item is picked as case ID, the process step ”place order” would occur for every item-case and thus suggesting a much higher number of order creations. 3) The need to aggregate information. One order with multiple packages only has an aggregated delivery time (traditional) instead of having multiple delivery cases with their respective time (OCPM).
The discovered object-centric directly-follows graph (DFG) is shown in figure 1. The order to cash process displayed consists of three colored objects: orders - golden, items blue and packages - dark grey. Activities are colored like the object that causes them, arcs like the interacting object. When objects interact they make use of the same activity as can be seen at the blue node ”pick item” which obviously originates from the item object but also is part of the package process, since a not-picked item cannot be put into a package. The object-centric DFG is more comprehensive than the traditional spaghetti-like DFG on the same event log. This underlines the large advantage and is the main reason for developing OCPM for MPM. Through OCPM the number of process variants is significantly reduced, since loops are largely eliminated and no events from other object types can interfere. Thus, the need to drill down into process data and analyzing only reduced subsets is obsolete. This unlocks important information that was previously hidden and could not be used to generate actionable insights. Additionally, the frequencies shown on the graph are correct.
Besides the fully interactive and customizable object-centric process graph - which is an adaption of existing research results - the innovations intended to broaden the topic of OCPM in the process mining community are the application of conformance checking on object-centric event logs, the provision and use of object attributes for analysis, and the investigation of the influence between the object types.
The MPM Conformance Checking module [
As MPM is using its synergies with Qlik©, the other two
objectives can be reached. Issues regarding data modelling
such as the linkage of different objects can be easily tackled
[
Since certain analysis is dependent on the modelling of object interaction, MPM overcomes the downside of insufficient modelling by calculating the traditional model as well, e.g., to identify maverick buying (invoice posted before order) the invoice activity has to be defined in the order object, otherwise the pattern can’t be found easily.
The motivation for OCPM-based MPM is a more comprehensive, less complex process analysis with simpler data and event modeling and thus, better quality. It simplifies process mining projects and increases the acceptance of process mining in organizations. To make OCPM enterprise-ready, traditional functionalities like conformance checking, the use of object attributes for analysis and the investigation of interobject relations have to be included which is presented in this demo. Further research and development is still required, like simple information representation of the different objects to reduce the entry-barrier for OCPM-based process mining.