Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Elmira Darzi ¹
• Mehrdad Agha Mohammad Ali Kermani ²
• Mostafa Jafari ³

¹ Master of Science Industrial Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran

² Assistant Professor of the Economics and Progress Engineering group at the School of Management, Economics and Progress Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran Corresponding Author: m_kermani@iust.ac.ir

³ Associate Professor of the Productivity and Project Management Group at the Industrial Engineering Department, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Due to their temporary nature and precise time and cost planning, project organizations are more involved in the relationship between data and operational processes, which requires the correctness of the actual processes of the organization. On the other hand, one of the essential issues for managing project-oriented organizations is its business process management, but due to the dynamic behavior and complexity of the nature of a project-oriented organization, identifying the processes through the traditional modeling of business process management is not reliable. The emerging solution to this problem is called "process mining." The paper introduces a framework that employs accurate process identification to measure the performance of business units relative to reality. This comprehensive framework undertakes the prerequisite steps of identification, including monitoring and cleaning the process-aware information systems' data to discover the process's current state and examine it from different perspectives based on the selected process. The primary purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for improving the P2P process in Chavosh Rah Company through process mining. The paper presents a framework to enhance the P2P process in project-oriented organization by implementing and extracting knowledge from the process, discovering unexpected and hidden relationships, and finding bottlenecks by employing process mining.
 

Introduction

Today, organizations must identify and manage their current processes for an effective approach. Workflow management systems are used to support business processes. Although current workflow management systems support the design, configuration, execution, and control of the processes under their control, there are deficiencies in the troubleshooting phase. Process mining is used to fill these gaps. Process mining is a bridge between data science and process science. The main aspects of process mining are the "discovery, monitoring, and improvement of real processes by extracting knowledge from event information" that is accessible in today's systems.
By evaluating real behaviors, process analysis provides a realistic view of operational processes, which is useful and important in developing support systems or redesigning previous processes. The purpose of process mining is to extract non-obvious and practical information related to processes from the event graph. The event log is actually the recorded data related to the events of the execution of a business process in an organization. One of the most important characteristics of an event diagram is that it is formed based on the events that happen. This means that regardless of how an organization's business process is planned or designed, the event graph contains data on how the process is implemented in reality.
Applications of process mining have been covering articles in the fields of health, information technology, finance, education, government affairs, energy, agriculture, logistics, public relations, media, and tourism. The purchase request process with the process analysis approach in the project organization is the innovation center of this article because no research has been done in line with this point of view. Of course, this article is a scientific and practical project. Naturally, the analyzes and results are based on the real data of each organization, which is usually different from other organizations, but by doing such a project, the obtained results can be generalized for organizations that have similar performance.
After the preparation of the event diagram, it is possible to define the APQC-approved relevant indicators in parallel with the start of the process analysis and analyze the organization from the perspective of these indicators. Then, with the help of interviews with the organization's experts who are involved in the purchasing process, improvement suggestions are collected and announced to the organization's management unit. The case study in this article is about the purchasing process of a contracting company. Chavosh Rah Bana Company was established in order to implement infrastructure projects in the fields of road construction, construction, and facilities. Shopping in Chavosh Rah Bana company includes the steps of registering a request, checking the request, checking the warehouse by the warehouse of the available goods, requesting a non-existent purchase, asking the price by the procurement unit, management approval, choosing the payment method and issuing a valid check or purchase, and finally registering a debt or registration It is creditable.
Research Question(s)
In this article, the following questions are raised, which we will try to answer by advancing the goals of the article had:
1) Does the mining process have a direct impact on the purchase request process?
2) Is time optimization effective in planning based on process analysis?
3) Is there a logical and acceptable answer in planning based on the use of real data? Will we reach the mining process?
4) Which is the most common path in the process?
5) In what order are the items (cases) distributed in the process?
6) How much do the cases conform to the process model? What problems are there?
7) What is the average/minimum/maximum operation time of the process?
8) Which of the tasks takes more time?
9) How are the cases actually implemented?

Literature Review

In the field of the purchasing process, two articles were studied, which are related to 2019 and 2018. The first article with the topic "Using process mining to find the main factors of delay in the internal purchasing process" was prepared by Virginia Eitzel Contras, Jesus Andres Portillo, and Fernando Gonzalez. In this article, the internal purchasing process of Quintal company was investigated. The software used in this article is Fluxicon Disco software. In this article, 608 cases (9199 events) were analyzed. The purpose of this paper was to increase the efficiency of Quintal's internal purchasing department through recommendations based on the analysis of their process reports.
The second paper "Process Mining Analysis of Purchasing Process in a Heavy Manufacturing Industry" was prepared by Chiwon Chu and Hind Rebigid. In this article, the purchasing process in a marine and ship parts manufacturing company in Korea was investigated. The software used in this article is Fluxicon Disco software. In this article, 663 cases (9829 events) were analyzed. This article identified the activities in which the process consumes a lot of time and also rework occurs in them.
In the review article on the application of process mining by Dakik et al., a review of the researches conducted on the subject of the applications of process mining until 2018 was done and the result was that the main use of process mining was in the fields of health, information technology, finance, production and It is education.
In 2018, Baykazoglu et al. published an article entitled "An approach based on process analysis to evaluate students' performance in computer tests". In this article, by tracing the logs of the students' journeys on the computer, the process of answering them has been discovered and analyzed.
The first study that used process mining to explore and analyze an inter-organizational process was conducted by VanderAalst in 2000. During this research, workflows between different organizations were modeled and analyzed. After that, an article on supply chain processes in the field of discovery of distribution processes in the supply chain was done by Maroster et al. in 2003.
In 2009, Garek et al. analyzed the RFID-oriented supply chain process. In this supply chain, the position of each item is tracked by its special code, and this makes it possible to get the most out of the mining process.
In 2014, Bernardi et al. discovered inter-organizational business rules through the data available in cloud data and by process mining. In 2014, Klaze et al. presented research on the integration of the event diagram of several different organizations to start process analysis.
Many researches have been conducted on the application of process mining for the three main actions of discovery, compliance review, and improvement. The literature review of this section includes all the books and articles published in the journal and some theses that have accurately used the words process analysis and performance or efficiency in their title. The first time that process mining has been introduced as a performance measurement methodology, Park et al. compared 19 block production processes in a Korean shipbuilding company by DEA. The main contribution and goal of their research is the development of one of the DEA models, and they used automatic process analysis results only to measure the 5 performance indicators they considered. The review goes under these subheadings.
In 2015, a part of Leer et al.'s book was published in Germany called Process Performance Evaluation. In this section, the process performance evaluation procedure is described as a part of the BPM cycle by introducing the generalities of process analysis and DEA along with an application example. Then in the same year in 2016, in his senior thesis at the University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands, van den Ing measured the performance of different paths of purchase-to-payment process in an organization.
Many articles have been published in the field of health in this regard. In 2019, Rojas et al. analyzed the performance of emergency room departments to help decision-makers improve the quality of medical center services. Also, using a case study of process mining, by extracting data from a hospital information system, Bettinni et al. The performance of this system was evaluated using the time indicators available in the process analysis tool. In 2020, Anastasia Pika and colleagues studied process mining to protect the privacy of people's information recorded in healthcare and analyzed data privacy and application requirements for healthcare process data.
In the field of the food industry, in 2021, Mathew Mastella investigated the process of mining in this industry. Also, in 2020, Peyman Badakhshan and his colleagues investigated the purchase order process with the help of mining in the paint industry.

Methodology

The main methodology proposed in this article is briefly and clearly presented in Figure 1. As can be seen, the access to the raw data available in the current software in the company is the starting point of this article. After that, the image of the event, which is considered the input of any process mining tool, should be extracted by monitoring the raw data of the systems, so that various process mining techniques can be applied to it. Discovery and analysis of the process in order to see the details of the process paths in the studied period by Behfaleb software is the next step. After preparing the event diagram, in parallel with the start of the process analysis, the relevant APQC-approved indicators can be defined and the organization can be analyzed from the perspective of these indicators. Then, with the help of interviews with the organization's experts who are involved in the purchasing process, improvement suggestions are collected and announced to the organization's management unit.
Figure 1. Methodology
 

Conclusion

In this article, it is focused on the application of process mining in the purchasing process of a project-oriented organization. The competitive conditions have forced contractor companies (project oriented) to manage their processes completely and to get help from strategic and operational tools to improve their performance. In this regard, the main goal of this article is to examine one of the important processes of the project-oriented company (purchasing process). For the case study, the data obtained from the purchase process of Chavosh Rah Bana's project-oriented company has been used. With the help of the obtained data, the purchase process of the company was extracted and analyzed from different perspectives. With the help of these analyses and the review of the time indicators introduced in APQC, suggestions for improvement were presented with the help of the company's expert group. Of course, these suggestions can be used in other project-oriented organizations that have a similar function to this type of organization. The suggestions are as follows:
1) Correct purchase planning
2) Having a vendor list of suppliers with relevant indicators
3) The flow of systemic thinking in the organization
4) Using people with expertise
5) Using the warning system to implement activities on time
6) periodic reporting and timely registration in the system
7) Increasing the number of personnel in the procurement unit
8) Teaching the principles and techniques of negotiation
Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to Behin Sazan Farayand Amin Knowledge Based Company, the developer of the first Iranian mining process tool (Bahfalab) for supporting this research. We also thank Mr. Engin
nization, Purchasing Process.

Keywords

• Process mining
• Business process management
• Event log
• Project-oriented organization
• P2P process

Main Subjects

• Data science, intelligence and future analysis