Process mining

Process mining is a process management technique that allows for the analysis of business processes based on event logs. Process mining uses specialized data-mining algorithms to extract knowledge from event logs recorded by an information system. Process mining aims at efficiency and understanding of processes by providing techniques and tools for discovering process, control, data, organizational, and social structures from event logs. This is also known in the industry as Automated Business Process Discovery (ABPD)

Overview

Process mining techniques are often used when no formal description of the process can be obtained by other approaches, or when the quality of an existing documentation is questionable. For example, the audit trails of a workflow management system, the transaction logs of an enterprise resource planning system, and the electronic patient records in a hospital can be used to discover models describing processes, organizations, and products. Moreover, such event logs can also be used to compare event logs with some prior model to see whether the observed reality conforms to some prescriptive or descriptive model.