scholarly journals Process Mining Techniques in Internal Auditing: A Stepwise Case Study

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 48-76
Author(s):  
Flavia Maria Santoro ◽  
Kate Cerqueira Revoredo ◽  
Rosa M.M. Costa ◽  
Thais Mester Barboza

A business process is a sequence of activities organized in a logical way in order to produce a service or a product that is valued for a particular group of customers. Process auditing in corporate environment aims to assess the degree of compliance of processes and their controls. Due to the volume of information that needs to be analyzed in an audit job, auditing´s cost can be very high. We argue that process mining techniques have the potential to improve this activity, allowing the auditor to meet the short deadlines, as well as bringing greater value to the senior management and reliability in the service provided by the audit. The goal of this paper is to discuss, through a case study, how process mining techniques can optimize and bring agility to the verification of process model compliance against the process actually performed. With this approach, it will be possible to detect errors and/or failures in activities or controls of a running process. The main contribution of this paper is to describe a simple set of steps that could be applied by auditors and experts in order to get introduced and to obtain the first insights in the process mining area.

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 3438
Author(s):  
Jorge Fernandes ◽  
João Reis ◽  
Nuno Melão ◽  
Leonor Teixeira ◽  
Marlene Amorim

This article addresses the evolution of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) in the automotive industry, exploring its contribution to a shift in the maintenance paradigm. To this end, we firstly present the concepts of predictive maintenance (PdM), condition-based maintenance (CBM), and their applications to increase awareness of why and how these concepts are revolutionizing the automotive industry. Then, we introduce the business process management (BPM) and business process model and notation (BPMN) methodologies, as well as their relationship with maintenance. Finally, we present the case study of the Renault Cacia, which is developing and implementing the concepts mentioned above.


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.


Author(s):  
Bruna Brandão ◽  
Flávia Santoro ◽  
Leonardo Azevedo

In business process models, elements can be scattered (repeated) within different processes, making it difficult to handle changes, analyze process for improvements, or check crosscutting impacts. These scattered elements are named as Aspects. Similar to the aspect-oriented paradigm in programming languages, in BPM, aspect handling has the goal to modularize the crosscutting concerns spread across the models. This process modularization facilitates the management of the process (reuse, maintenance and understanding). The current approaches for aspect identification are made manually; thus, resulting in the problem of subjectivity and lack of systematization. This paper proposes a method to automatically identify aspects in business process from its event logs. The method is based on mining techniques and it aims to solve the problem of the subjectivity identification made by specialists. The initial results from a preliminary evaluation showed evidences that the method identified correctly the aspects present in the process model.


2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julio Cesar Sampaio do Prado Leite ◽  
Flavia Maria Santoro ◽  
Claudia Cappelli ◽  
Thais Vasconcelos Batista ◽  
Fabiana Jack Nogueira Santos

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a representation scheme based on the i* strategic actor model to represent the process owner information and show how to incorporate this approach into the event driven process chain and Business Process Modeling Notation-BPMN meta-models and also into the aspect-oriented business process modeling (BPM) context. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use a case study in a real setting to evaluate the proposal and a controlled experiment to get more evidence about its relevance. Findings – The authors presented evidence both from a case study in a real-world library showing the importance of representing – previously unavailable – process owner information, and from an experiment which involved participants analyzing the same models of the case study, confirming the preliminary evidences. It is important to stress the recognition that the proposed representation provided more transparency, in terms of ownership, than the usual BPM models. These benefits are due to the combination of the aspect-oriented approach and the strategic actor model, providing ownership information in a more transparent way. Originality/value – The authors not only argue the importance of clearly established process ownership, both of the core process and the aspectual process, but also the authors presented an approach to represent the actor involved in process and aspect ownership as an instantiation of the i* strategic actor. Using this approach, the process owner can be defined in terms of actors instead of the activities performed. It is also possible to define the aspect owner and to include the aspectual process concept in the business process model.


2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
August Tsai

Purpose – This study aims to introduce an empirical model which incorporates newsgroups, knowledge forums, knowledge assets and knowledge application processes to share organisational knowledge. Therefore it seeks to illustrate an application for integrating knowledge management (KM) into the business process. Design/methodology/approach – The Taiwanese contingent of an international certification body – also a council member of the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) – was selected for a case study. A hybrid technology infrastructure was designed and employed to implement the proposed model. Based on knowledge value added validation, the proposed KM model provides a set of new operating systems for sharing knowledge within an organisation. Findings – Although many theories regarding implementation of KM in organisations have been proposed and studied, an application model for practical integration of various modern principles to share organisational knowledge is strategically important. Therefore a model that integrates principal KM applications into the business process, and the measurement of the resulting benefits, has been developed. Originality/value – Knowledge is a valuable asset for an individual in today's economy; nevertheless the acquisition of such an asset relies heavily on knowledge sharing within an organisation. The author has proposed an exclusive hybrid platform with an empirical process model to address innovative approaches and practical values of KM within an organisation.


Author(s):  
Miguel Hose Pérez Álvarez ◽  
Luisa Parody ◽  
María Teresa Gómez-López ◽  
Rafael Gasca ◽  
Paolo Ceravolo

Business Processes facilitate the execution of a set of activities to achieve the strategic plans of a company. During the execution of a business process model, several decisions can be made that frequently involve the values of the input data of certain activities. The decision regarding the value of these input data concerns not only the correct execution of the business process in terms of consistency, but also the compliance with the strategic plans of the company. Smart decision-support systems provide information by analyzing the process model and the business rules to be satisfied, but other elements, such as the previous temporal variation of the data during the former executed instances of similar processes, can also be employed to guide the input data decisions at instantiation time. Our proposal consists of learning the evolution patterns of the temporal variation of the data values in a process model extracted from previous process instances by ap plying Constraint Programming techniques. The knowledge obtained is applied in a Decision Support System (DSS) which helps in the maintenance of the alignment of the process execution with the organizational strategic plans, through a framework and a methodology. Finally, to present a proof of concept, the proposal has been applied to a complete case study.


Author(s):  
Lerina Aversano ◽  
Fiammetta Marulli ◽  
Maria Tortorella

The relationship existing between a business process and the supporting software system is a critical concern for organizations, as it directly affects their performance. The knowledge regarding this relationship plays an important role in the software evolution process, as it helps to identify the software components involved by a software change request. The research described in this chapter concerns the use of information retrieval techniques in the software maintenance activities. In particular, the chapter addresses the problem of recovering traceability links between the entities of the business process model and components of the supporting software system. Therefore, an information retrieval approach is proposed based on two processing phases including syntactic and semantic analysis. The usefulness of the approach is discussed through a case study.


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