Process Mining for Business Process Standardization in ERP Implementation Projects – An SAP S/4 HANA Case Study from Manufacturing

Organizations increasingly build operations on enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. However, ERP implementation projects require significant process transformation and standardization to successfully use ERP systems. This article presents a case study in a manufacturing corporation to demonstrate how process mining can be used for process decisionmaking in an SAP S/4 HANA implementation project. In particular, the corporation implements process mining for the analysis of the SAP purchase-to-pay (“Purchas-ing”) and the order-to-cash (“Sales”) processes to determine whether the future to-be process should be standardized according to ERP standards, or to be individualized in a corporate-specific template. Further, process mining can be used to select suitable standard process specifications from the SAP Best Practices Explorer, as well as to analyze the required process changes before the launch of the new ERP system and process implementations