In brief
Case ID, activity and timestamp form the classic event log. Production and logistics often require an object-centric view of orders, materials, batches and deliveries.
What does process mining provide?
Process mining reconstructs observed process behaviour from event data and connects variants with time, quantity, resources and deviations. It can support discovery, conformance checking, performance analysis and operational monitoring.
The event log is a business model
A classic event log contains a case, activity and timestamp. Production and logistics also require a decision on what the case represents. Orders, materials, batches, handling units and deliveries interact. Forcing them into one case ID can create duplication or loss of context.
- 01
Question
Decision and boundary
- 02
Data model
Cases, objects and events
- 03
Quality
Completeness and semantics
- 04
Analysis
Variants, time and rules
- 05
Verification
Cause and action
Data quality before process maps
Timestamp meaning, overwritten states, duplicates, cancellations, late manual postings, time zones and missing unrecorded cases are tested explicitly.
Limits of directly-follows graphs
A directly-follows graph shows observed adjacency. It can misrepresent concurrency and loops, and frequency filtering changes which behaviour remains visible. Van der Aalst explains these risks in A practitioner's guide to process mining: Limitations of the directly-follows graph.
Analysis levels
| Level | Question | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery | What happened? | variants and model |
| Performance | Where do time and WIP accumulate? | waiting and bottleneck patterns |
| Conformance | How does observed behaviour differ? | deviations with context |
| Enhancement | Which attributes explain behaviour? | segments and hypotheses |
From correlation to action
A pattern is not yet a cause. Process owners verify whether a site, product or shift explains an issue or merely correlates with another factor. Measures receive target metrics and a before-after or comparison design.
Related: process-mining consulting, value stream analysis, event log and object-centric process mining.