Process Mining of Event Logs: A Case Study Evaluating Internal Control Effectiveness

Author(s):  
Tiffany Chiu ◽  
Mieke Julie Jans
2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 141-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiffany Chiu ◽  
Mieke Jans

SYNOPSISThis paper aims at adopting process mining to evaluate the effectiveness of internal control using a real-life event log. Specifically, the evaluation is based on the full population of an event log and it contains four analyses: (1) variant analysis that identifies standard and non-standard variants, (2) segregation of duties analysis that examines whether employees violate segregation of duties controls, (3) personnel analysis that investigates whether employees are involved in multiple potential control violations, and (4) timestamp analysis that detects time-related issues including weekend activities and lengthy process duration. Results from the case study indicate that process mining could assist auditors in identifying audit-relevant issues such as non-standard variants, weekend activities, and personnel who are involved in multiple violations. Process mining enables auditors to detect potential risks, ineffective internal controls, and inefficient processes. Therefore, process mining generates a new type of audit evidence and could revolutionize the current audit procedure.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 385-392
Author(s):  
Edyta Brzychczy

Abstract Process modelling is a very important stage in a Business Process Management cycle enabling process analysis and its redesign. Many sources of information for process modelling purposes exist. It may be an analysis of documentation related directly or indirectly to the process being analysed, observations or participation in the process. Nowadays, for this purpose, it is increasingly proposed to use the event logs from organization’s IT systems. Event logs could be analysed with process mining techniques to create process models expressed by various notations (i.e. Petri Nets, BPMN, EPC). Process mining enables also conformance checking and enhancement analysis of the processes. In the paper issues related to process modelling and process mining are briefly discussed. A case study, an example of delivery process modelling with process mining technique is presented.


Author(s):  
Diogo R. Ferreira

This chapter introduces the principles of sequence clustering and presents two case studies where the technique is used to discover behavioral patterns in event logs. In the first case study, the goal is to understand the way members of a software team perform their daily work, and the application of sequence clustering reveals a set of behavioral patterns that are related to some of the main processes being carried out by that team. In the second case study, the goal is to analyze the event history recorded in a technical support database in order to determine whether the recorded behavior complies with a predefined issue handling process. In this case, the application of sequence clustering confirms that all behavioral patterns share a common trend that resembles the original process. Throughout the chapter, special attention is given to the need for data preprocessing in order to obtain results that provide insight into the typical behavior of business processes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-67
Author(s):  
Mieke Jans

ABSTRACT Applying process mining as an analytical procedure is a relatively young stream of thought in auditing. This paper examines the first step of such process-mining projects, which involves extracting and structuring the data in the required format for analysis. The article has a dual purpose: (1) to provide an overview of the choices to be made in this phase, and (2) to provide insights into the current event log preferences of auditors. These insights are valuable for a better understanding of how event logs are currently structured, along with the consequences of this structure for the analytical procedure. This matter is important because different preparation steps could lead to varying analytical procedures and consequently, to other audit evidence. This study also aims to reveal what data are perceived as most valuable to the auditor for further analysis. To address this goal, a case study has been conducted.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Weidong Zhao ◽  
Xi Liu ◽  
Weihui Dai

Process mining is automated acquisition of process models from event logs. Although many process mining techniques have been developed, most of them are based on control flow. Meanwhile, the existing role-oriented process mining methods focus on correctness and integrity of roles while ignoring role complexity of the process model, which directly impacts understandability and quality of the model. To address these problems, we propose a genetic programming approach to mine the simplified process model. Using a new metric of process complexity in terms of roles as the fitness function, we can find simpler process models. The new role complexity metric of process models is designed from role cohesion and coupling, and applied to discover roles in process models. Moreover, the higher fitness derived from role complexity metric also provides a guideline for redesigning process models. Finally, we conduct case study and experiments to show that the proposed method is more effective for streamlining the process by comparing with related studies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-168
Author(s):  
Julio C Carrasquel ◽  
Khalil Mecheraoui

Conformance checking methods diagnose to which extent a real system, whose behavior is recorded in an event log, complies with its specification model, e.g., a Petri net. Nonetheless, the majority of these methods focus on checking isolated process instances, neglecting interaction between instances in a system. Addressing this limitation, a series of object-centric approaches have been proposed in the field of process mining. These approaches are based on the holistic analysis of the multiple process instances interacting in a system, where each instance is centered on the handling of an object. Inspired by the object-centric paradigm, this paper presents a replay-based conformance checking method which uses a class of colored Petri nets (CPNs) -- a Petri net extension where tokens in the model carry values of some types (colors). Particularly, we consider conservative workflow CPNs which allow to describe the expected behavior of a system whose components are centered on the end-to-end processing of distinguishable objects. For describing a system’s real behavior, we consider event logs whose events have sets of objects involved in the execution of activities. For replay, we consider a jump strategy where tokens absent from input places of a transition to fire move from their current place of the model to the requested places. Token jumps allow to identify desire lines, i.e., object paths unforeseen in the specification. Also, we introduce local diagnostics based on the proportion of jumps in specific model components. The metrics allow to inform the severity of deviations in precise system parts. Finally, we report experiments supported by a prototype of our method. To show the practical value of our method, we employ a case study on trading systems, where orders from users are matched to trade.


2021 ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Wen Gao ◽  
Xuanming Zhang ◽  
Weixin Huang ◽  
Shaohang Shi

AbstractIn this study, we applied machine learning to mine the event logs generated in modeling process for behavior sequence clustering. The motivation for the study is to develop cognitively intelligent 3D tools through process mining which has been a hot area in recent years. In this study, we develop a novel classification method Command2Vec to perceive, learn and classify different design behavior during 3D-modeling aided design process. The method is applied in a case study of 112 participate students on a ‘Spiral-stair’ modeling task. By extracting the event logs generated in each participate student’s modeling process into a new data structures: ‘command graph’, we classified participants’ behavior sequences from final 99 valid event logs into certain groups using our novel Command2Vec. To verify the effectiveness of our classification, we invited five experts with extensive modeling experience to grade the classification results. The final grading shows that our algorithm performs well in certain grouping of classification with significant features.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 4121
Author(s):  
Hana Tomaskova ◽  
Erfan Babaee Tirkolaee

The purpose of this article was to demonstrate the difference between a pandemic plan’s textual prescription and its effective processing using graphical notation. Before creating a case study of the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) of the Czech Republic’s pandemic plan, we conducted a systematic review of the process approach in pandemic planning and a document analysis of relevant public documents. The authors emphasized the opacity of hundreds of pages of text records in an explanatory case study and demonstrated the effectiveness of the process approach in reengineering and improving the response to such a critical situation. A potential extension to the automation and involvement of SMART technologies or process optimization through process mining techniques is presented as a future research topic.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 5476
Author(s):  
Ana Pajić Simović ◽  
Slađan Babarogić ◽  
Ognjen Pantelić ◽  
Stefan Krstović

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are often seen as viable sources of data for process mining analysis. To perform most of the existing process mining techniques, it is necessary to obtain a valid event log that is fully compliant with the eXtensible Event Stream (XES) standard. In ERP systems, such event logs are not available as the concept of business activity is missing. Extracting event data from an ERP database is not a trivial task and requires in-depth knowledge of the business processes and underlying data structure. Therefore, domain experts require proper techniques and tools for extracting event data from ERP databases. In this paper, we present the full specification of a domain-specific modeling language for facilitating the extraction of appropriate event data from transactional databases by domain experts. The modeling language has been developed to support complex ambiguous cases when using ERP systems. We demonstrate its applicability using a case study with real data and show that the language includes constructs that enable a domain expert to easily model data of interest in the log extraction step. The language provides sufficient information to extract and transform data from transactional ERP databases to the XES format.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Cong Liu ◽  
Huiling Li ◽  
Qingtian Zeng ◽  
Ting Lu ◽  
Caihong Li

To support effective emergency disposal, organizations need to collaborate with each other to complete the emergency mission that cannot be handled by a single organization. In general, emergency disposal that involves multiple organizations is typically organized as a group of interactive processes, known as cross-organization emergency response processes (CERPs). The construction of CERPs is a time-consuming and error-prone task that requires practitioners to have extensive experience and business background. Process mining aims to construct process models by analyzing event logs. However, existing process mining techniques cannot be applied directly to discover CERPs since we have to consider the complexity of various collaborations among different organizations, e.g., message exchange and resource sharing patterns. To tackle this challenge, a CERP model mining method is proposed in this paper. More specifically, we first extend classical Petri nets with resource and message attributes, known as resource and message aware Petri nets (RMPNs). Then, intra-organization emergency response process (IERP) models that are represented as RMPNs are discovered from emergency drilling event logs. Next, collaboration patterns among emergency organizations are formally defined and discovered. Finally, CERP models are obtained by merging IERP models and collaboration patterns. Through comparative experimental evaluation using the fire emergency drilling event log, we illustrate that the proposed approach facilitates the discovery of high-quality CERP models than existing state-of-the-art approaches.


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