Discovering Interacting Artifacts from ERP Systems (Extended Abstract)

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are widely used to manage business documents along a business processes and allow very detailed recording of event data of past process executions and involved documents. This recorded event data is the basis for auditing and detecting unusual flows.Process mining techniques can analyze event data of processes stored in linear event logs to discover a process model that reveals unusual executions. Existing techniques assume a linear event log that use a single case identifier to which all behavior can be related. However, in ERP systems processes such as Order to Cash operate on multiple interrelated business objects, each having their own case identifier, their own behavior, and interact with each other. Forcing these into a single case creates ambiguous dependencies caused by data convergence and divergence which obscures unusual flows in the resulting process model.We present a new semi-automatic, end-to-end approach for analyzing event data in a plain database of an ERP system for unusual executions. We identify an artifact-centric process model describing the business objects, their life-cycles, and how the various objects interact along their life-cycles. The technique was validated in two case studies and reliably revealed unusual flows later confirmed by domain experts