The Research on the Usage of Business Process Mining in the Implementation
of BPR
XIE Yi–wu
1, LI Xiao–wan
1, Chen Yan
2(1.School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, 116026,
China
；
2. School of Economics and Management, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, 116026, China)
E-mail:
xieyiwu@dlmu.edu.cn
,
priest_li@hotmail.com
Abstract
As an important approach of enterprise improvement, Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) has become the basis of enterprise information, organization change, etc. Great changes are difficult to be obtained only by experts’ subjective decision-making, and efficient decision-making support tools are lack at the moment. Business process mining (BPM) does well in knowledge management and decision-making support. It is significant for successful implementation if BPM could be introduced into BPR projects. This paper describes the current implementation framework of the BPR, the development of the BPM and the research on usage of business Process Mining in the implementation of BPR Projects. At the end of paper propose the implementation framework of BPR based on the BPM.
Keywords: BPR; Business process mining (BPM); Petri net; Process reengineering life cycle；
1. Introduction
The concept of BPR (Business Process Reengineering) is put forward by Michael Hammer in 1990. And it is introduced into the Chinese academia at the middle of 1990s and becomes gradually accepted by the Chinese local enterprises during the wide usage of the enterprise resource planning (ERP). The BPR rolls up the Europe and America as the management revolution theory. Many large companies of America, such as IBM, Kodak, General Motors, Ford, XEROX and AT&T, try to make use of it to improve their businesses. And the BPR theory becomes more and more attractive as the time passes. It is indicated that many enterprises have achieved very excited progresses though the BPR. And it proved that the BPR theory is the efficient means for the company to face the competitive pressure and the changing business conditions.
Unfortunately, it is hard and costly for many enterprises to make use of the BPR in their real business projects. As it is reported 70% of the Business Process Reengineering projects failed eventually. However, the reason of high failure rate during BPR implementation is not the BPR theory itself, but the lack of efficient support tools.
1.1 Contribution
Unlike the BPR paper in which the management ideas are emphasized, we discuss the important roles that Information technology plays in the BPR projects. In this paper, we analyze the existed problems in the current BRP framework, especially the Process Reengineering Life Cycle methodology. And then we proposed the BRP framework based on the Business Process Mining, which was based on the Petri net.
1.2 Paper Organization
At the first part of this paper, we discuss the framework of BPR implementation and then the existed problems in the Process Reengineering Life Cycle methodology. Further more, we discuss the relationship between BPR projects and Information Technology.
And then we summarize the development of Business Process Mining, propose the BPR framework based on the BPM.
At the end of the paper, we use a case for study to illustrate the advantages of the BPR based on the BPM.
2. The framework of BPR implementation
2.1. Process Reengineering Life Cycle methodologyThe efficiency of the BPR is increasingly seen as vital to the success of the company. For the companies to run their business competitively, they need to implement the BPR project.
2007 IFIP International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing - Workshops 2007 IFIP International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing - Workshops 2007 IFIP International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing - Workshops
Guha,Kettinger and Teng [1] promoted the main
framework of Process Reengineering Life Cycle, which support the BPR implementation. The methodology of BPR combines radical change (or incremental approaches) and quality management (take total quality management (TQM) for example) which is composed of a set of phases and activities in the change project.
The Process Reengineering Life Cycle methodology is built on the analyses of the means, task, and technique of the current BPR methodology. It divides the change project into six parts: Plan, Start, Diagnose, Redesign, Reconstruct, and Monitor, which is shown in the Fig1. [1]
2.2. Problems in the current BPR framework
During the Diagnose phase, the main work is to construct the old solution in proper way to find the weakness of the current business process, which is also useful to estimate the potential gains and measure the future redesigned solution when the change project finished. However even for the clean sheet or radical business process reengineering project, we also need to descript the current solution properly. For this reason, most organizations are interested in identifying the current information system in a respective, objective and, cost efficient way.
Mostly, at the current change project, each member of the BPR team is sent to the sub-system of the current solution depending on his specialty. Interviews and workshops are organized to discuss important parts of the business processes. So the constructed current business models are based on the discussion However, this boring process suffers from subjective, fragmented, and event the unreliable data. Involving more people may improve the quality of the manual process diagnose work, but the corresponding costs may exceed the gains of project.
At the same time, the team member uses the digraph or the IDEF to descript the current business flow, which uses the graph or the text to define the business process. To some extend it is easy for the user to understand. However, it is difficult to picture the essential characteristic of the current business processes. So it is helpless to analyze and value the current system.
And at the monitor phase, the new designed processes need to be monitored and valued to make sure that they are consistent with the planted. What is more, the bottleneck founded in the diagnose phase should be overcame in the redesigned processes. But the current methods can not achieve the aim, which is harmful for the further improvement of process.
Figure 1 Framework of Process Reengineering Life cycle
3 What is the Relation between BPR and
Information Technology?
Hammer (1990) considers information technology (IT) as the key enabler of BPR which he considers as "radical change." [2]
The challenge of BPR is often linked to its use of
IT, which should be viewed as more than automating
or mechanizing force. IT could be used to challenge the assumptions inherent in the work processes that have existed since long before the advent of modern computer and communications technology. Furthermore, IT and BPR have recursive relationship. IT capabilities should support business processes, and business processes should be in terms of the capabilities IT can provide.
Recently, the development of IT, especially the business process mining technology, gives sufficient support for the successful implementation of BPR.
4. Business Process Mining
4.1 The concept of process miningIn 1998, R.Agrawal D.Gunopulos F.Leymann posted the concept of the process mining. The goal of process mining is to extract information about business processes from transaction logs It is assumed that it is
possible to record events such that (ⅰ)each event
refers to a task (i.e. a well defined step in the process),(
ⅱ)each event refers to a case(i.e. a process instance ),(
ⅲ)each event can have a performer also referred to as
originator (the actor executing or initiating the BPR Start Description of the current solution Value the redesigned solution
Monitor the new business flow
Diagnose the old solution
Redesign the work flow
activity), and (iv) events have a timestamp and are totally ordered[3].
From the definition, we can find the aim of process mining is to reconstruct the current solution and to diagnose and value the business process.
4.2 Development of the process mining
The technology of business process mining take a very important part in different fields from posted in the middle of 1990s.We divide the development into three phases.
Phase1. The process mining is mainly used in the software engineering field. At that time, the data analyze based on the process event is called the process
discover .Cook and Wolf [4] posted three means for the
process discover, which is the purely algorithmic method, the purely statistical and the combination of the two different means. Under this technique, data describing process events are first captured from an on-going process and then used to generate a formal model of the behavior of that process. They develop process discover tool named DAGAMA. The generated model by the DAGAMA can be viewed in the process model viewer of BALBOA, and also could be stored in file format to use in the other model view tools. (For example, Endeavors is developed by the Cal. University development team, which generates and run the process model.) The process discovering tool called DAGAMA was used in the AT&T laboratory, which is used to handle the dynamic requirement of large numbers of communication software. However, the process discover did not deal with the parallel problem, and it is immaturity in the visualization of model.
Phase2.In this period, the process mining is mainly used in the software of electronic commerce management, which mainly deals with the relationship between the events and constructs the model. The software incorporate with the process mining is the Flow Mark, work flow management system, produced by IBM. It could mine model from the running result, which could be used in the work flow modeling in the work flow system to handle the generate model problems. Because of the development of the electric commerce, the process mining gradually interacts with Enterprise resource plan, Customer relationship management, and Supply chain management. The user could view the whole business process through the visualization of the process mining model. However because of the different interface in the different system, the measures of dealing with event logs vary from each other. What’s more, expression of the process mining model is not under the certain standard. All above mentions are disadvantage for the extensive usage of process mining.
Phase3. During this phase, the process mining mainly takes a very important part in the business process monitoring field. The main aspect of process mining is to analyze and redesign the current process. Process mining is not just a tool to design and redesign process model, but the tool to show the real business flow, which could monitor the variation of the work flow and promote the flexible of the business process. So the technology is applied to Business Intelligence (BI), business Process Analyses (BPA) and Knowledge Management (KM). And what is more, it could be the input for the Business Process Reengineering,
Continuous Process Improvement. [5, 6]
4.3 Business Process mining application
Process mining applications include feature of
three categories. ( ⅰ )Model construction –The
challenge of this feature is to dynamically construct business process models that are representative of the
business flows found in the event logs. (ⅱ)Statically
performance analysis-this feature aims to extract the development of predefined statistical measures (key
performance indicators). (ⅲ)Knowledge discovery –
Combining data in an event log with data from other sources, this feature category enables users to search for hidden patterns and relationships. [7]
4.4. The framework of the Business process mining
The information system, such as ERP, CRM generates the transaction logs when the systems run. All the logs are stored in the XML format to apply the process mining in different system, which is a joint between the information system and the process mining. And all the event logs are stored in the data
warehouse. [8] 。The log files in XML format use as
the input of the process mining. The real business process model is constructed through all kinds of mining arithmetic, which is used to analyze and redesign the process in the change plan after
comparing test with the expected models. [9]
4.5 The algorithm of the business process mining
There are several business processes mining algorithm in the different research project, which stand for the certain directions of the business process mining research.
(1) The inductive approach. Agrawal used the process mining arithmetic in the work flow management system. It is assumed that every event in the log files is separate, which means that there is no event running paralleling. So the there is the sequence
between each event. The approach borrows ideas from
machine learning and grammatical inference. [11]
(2) The algorithm based on ADONIS [12, 13]
The algorithm proposed by Herbst does well in dealing with mining workflow process with duplicate tasks. At the very beginning of process mining, every event obtains the unique names for the duplicate task. (e.g. “example1”,”example2”) The approach use the ADONIS to show the concurrent workflow clearly to the user, based on the stochastic activity graph. The workflow mining tool InWoLve (inductive workflow learning via examples) implements the mining algorithm. [6]
(3) The approach to mine block-structured
workflows. [6, 13] Schimm used four block structure to
show the relationships between events, which are sequence, concurrent, choice and loop. In dealing with the log files, they use the knowledge discover to clean the log data. At the end of algorithm, they distribute the resource of the model, considering the important effect of the resources. The approach is supported by a tool named Process Miner. This tool can read event-based workflow data from data-bases or from the log files in the XML format. It then automatically performs the complete process mining procedure on this data. [6] A more detail about the Process Miner in. [15]
(4) The approach based on the Petri net [6] [15-19]
Aalst and Weijter proposed α algorithm to mine
the data using a specific class of Petri nets, named
workflow nets, as a theoretical basis. [20][21] And α
algorithm could handle the current problems in the
process mining. Based on the Petri net, α algorithm
could detect the variation in the log files and reconstruct the current business flow. And they use the heuristic approaches to handle the data with noise and
incomplete logs. But the α algorithm has problems
dealing with non-free choice constructs [22] It is well
known that many problems that are insolubility for general Petri nets are decidable for free-choice nets. There are two tools to support this approach: EMIT and MiMo. Additional, the tool Little Thumb also support this approach but to deal with the noise at first.
5. Business Process Reengineering based
on Business Process Mining
Nowadays, every transaction is recorded in the event log files in almost every information system.
We could find the weaknesses, the certain processing time and the unexpected cases of current solution in the event logs. Using the process mining, we could reconstruct the real business processes and know more about the running process to improve
veracity and efficiency in the Description phase, instead of the tradition costly manual work. And also it is very useful to assess the weaknesses of current solution during the diagnose phase.
The process mining based on the Petri net promotes the usage of process mining in the BPR project. The characteristic of the Petri net as followed:
(ⅰ) Petri net have both strict semantics and graphical
language. (ⅱ) Petri net is model language based on
status. It clearly defines the status of the model element and process progress is droved by status. So it is easy to analyze the process progress and handle the flexible
work flow system. (ⅲ) Petri net has powerful analyze,
which support the analysis of the work flow models. During valuing the new designed solution, the models constructed by the process mining could be compared with the redesigned process models to make sure that the weaknesses existed in the old solution are overcame.
In the monitor phase of the BPR project, Because of the exception in the real process, it is useful to use the process mining to check the real running process. And finally let the process models are correspond with the variation of enterprise.
The framework of BPR based on the BPM is shown in Figure 2.
The framework needs the support of the existing information system. All the transaction data should be recorded in the log files in the work flow system or the ERP system. If the work flow contains any transaction external the information system or manual work, the model reconstructed by the process mining will ignore it, because these data are not existed in the log files.
Figure 2.The framework of BPR based on the BPM
6. Case for study
Below we describe a case to illustrate the advantages of BPR Projects based on the Business Process Mining.
The event logs are shown as Figure 3, which are produced during the control process in the current system. Num T Tpr TS T E 1 A Null 2007-3-17 9:30 2007-3-17 9:33 1 B A 2007-3-17 9:33 2007-3-17 9:35 1 D B 2007-3-17 9:35 2007-3-17 9:39 1 E D 2007-3-17 9:39 2007-3-17 9:45 2 A null 2007-3-17 10:20 2007-3-17 10:27 2 C A 2007-3-17 10:27 2007-3-17 10:30 2 D C 2007-3-17 10:27 2007-3-17 10:35 2 A D 2007-3-18 9:25 2007-3-18 9:35 2 B A 2007-3-18 9:35 007-3-18 9:38 2 D B 2007-3- 2007-3-18 9:38 18 9:40 2 E D 2007-3-18 9:40 2007-3-18 9:41 3 A Null 2007-3-18 9:20 2007-3-18 9:23 3 B A 2007-3-18 9:23 2007-3-18 9:25 3 D B 2007-3-18 9:25 2007-3-18 9:29 3 E D 2007-3-18 9:31 2007-3-18 9:35 4 A Null 2007-3-18 10:10 2007-3-18 10:14 4 C A 2007-3-18 10:14 2007-3-18 10:27 4 D C 2007-3-18 10:27 2007-3-18 10:30 4 E D 2007-3-18 10:30 2007-3-18 10:35 Figure 3 Original data log
In the log files, Num stands for the serial number of process instance. T means the event during the process. Tpr stands for the event happened before the current event. TS mean the event starting time and TE is the event ending time.
The model corresponding with the logs is shown as followed Figure 4, which is produced by our improved business process mining algorithm.
Figure 4 Process model constructed by the BPM Through the case, we can find that it is useful to construct the current process model to use the BPM, during the diagnose phase of the BPR projects We could easily know what the real running business processes are and find out the weakness of the current solution, instead of the painful and boring handwork.
P0 B C D E P1 A P2 BPR Plan BPR Start Descript the current solution Diagnose the old solution Redesign the work flow Value the redesigned solution Monitor business flow Business Process Mining
7. Conclusion
Business Process Mining, as the critical technology in the analyzing and redesigning process, gives a great support for the flexible variation and analyses of the work flow system. While the mining technology develops continuously, it will bring out more profound impacts on the BPR. And enterprises will eventually get great benefits from the BPR projects.
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