Getting Insights to Improve Business Processes with Agility: A Case Study Using Process Mining

The sales and technical engineering processes are neither sequential nor deterministic. Usually there are iterative feedback loops and optional steps during many activities like contract negotiations, product modification, specialist consulting, design calculations, management approval, validation tests or certification process. In large and complex manufacturing processes, the sales and product customization process is a challenge and significant efforts are required to understand and improve it. This paper presents an industry process mining application as a way to reduce efforts in the diagnostic and control phases of an improvement process project. The process mining was based on a multifaceted method to identify the most significant issues in control-flow, organizational structure, and performance. The approach used to discover the processes was the Fuzzy Miner algorithm, because it is robust in dealing with noise in the logs and unstructured processes. As a result, there was a reduction of efforts in the mapping phases that were much faster than the traditional process mapping. The work reported concerns events at a company related to the sales order up to the production process that are characterized as less structured.