As a warm-up for Process Mining Camp, we asked some of the speakers for an up-front interview. Previously, we already spoke with Tijn van Heijden, Walter Vanherle, and Lalit Wangikar. Today, you can read the fireside chat with our fourth practice speaker Youri Soons below.

Youri Soons has been working as an IT auditor for the Dutch National Auditing Service for more than 5 years. Currently, Youri is establishing process mining as a regular auditing tool within the institution.

At camp, you will get his perspective on how process mining helps to gain more assurance.

Interview with Youri

Anne: Can you still remember where and when you first heard about process mining? What exactly caught your attention and fascinated you about the topic?

Youri: That was about four years ago, during a presentation of a colleague IT auditor of the Ministry of Infrastructure & Environment. What fascinated me was that with a push of the button it will gain insight into the full mass. This makes it possible to find all the abnormalities in a process, but also derives a lot assurance from the data.

Anne: Right! How would you explain the concept of assurance to a non-auditor? And how does process mining help in gaining more assurance?

Youri: As auditor we are asked to provide assurance about the functioning of a process. For example, because it is required by law or because the customer wants to get a certain degree of assurance on the functioning of his process. It is then up to us to conduct an audit and determine whether we are able to provide that degree of assurance.

Process mining is, moreover, not the means by which you can provide assurance, you have to see it as a tool to provide the required assurance in a more efficient way. It is also not to say that we deliver more assurance than before.

Process mining provides insight on how the process is handled, by whom and when, but still says nothing about the correctness of decisions. You have to combine the results of process mining in a smart way with other research methods.

So, for example, we can determine whether steps are skipped or segregation of duties is broken. As a result, we are able to focus at the files of these exceptions.

Anne: Interesting, so what you are saying is that process mining helps you to see what is going right, and then to only focus on the exceptions?

Youri: That’s right. We always submit the results of the analyses against the intended process. Deviations may in fact mean that incorrect decisions are made. For example, that a subsidy is granted unfairly. And then we are just looking to those files.

Anne: Can you give us a sneak preview of what you will talk about at camp?

Youri: Providing assurance is tied to a number of conditions. I will show how we think you can efficiently deploy process mining in an assurance-based audit approach.

Anne: Thanks, Youri! We are really curious about your presentation!

Would you like to hear more from Youri about his experiences? Are you interested in sharing first-hand knowledge with fellow process miners? Register now to reserve your seat at Process Mining Camp on 28 May in Eindhoven. We only have a strictly limited number of tickets, and they are going fast…

We have finally finished the program for Process Mining Camp, and we are happy to tell you that we have found yet another great practice speaker: Philipp Horn from Volkswagen, Germany! This brings the total tally up to six practice talks — more than three hours of tales from the frontier, from experienced process mining pioneers who live there.

If you have not signed up for camp already, check out the program and sign up now! We have less than 15 seats left, so if you have considered coming we strongly advise you to make your move quickly.

The expedition workshops

The expedition workshops are our little experiment at this year’s camp, and we are really excited about them. Most likely when you hear ‘workshop’, you think of some sort of miniature conference with presentations or exercises — which is quite a different thing than what we have in mind. So, let us explain a bit more about what you can expect.

The initial trigger for the workshops was feedback we received from many people at last year’s camp. They told us how much they loved meeting other process miners, and exchanging their experiences in small, informal groups over coffee and drinks. Especially those campers who were lucky to run into others that shared their same interests or background¹ were enthusiastic about their encounters.

The expedition workshops are designed to make sure that every attendee at this year’s camp will have that experience. Each workshop has a maximum of 10 participants². We are going to ask all attendees to pick their top 3 workshops, and then we will try to match them into groups they are most interested in.

But even more important than that is that we will keep the setting informal: There are no specific rooms, no beamers, and such. Every workshop group will gather, and then find a place in the Zwarte Doos café or outside³ to settle down for their discussion.

So, please don’t expect a presentation by your workshop host, we specifically asked them to not prepare one. We did, however, make sure that you will have an exceptionally qualified expedition leader in your group to kick off the discussion, and to provide an informed point of view.

Just have a look at this amazing list of process mining experts who will host a workshop at camp:

• Workshop 1: Methodology
  Tijn van der Heijden from Deloitte, Netherlands, is the person to talk to about process mining project methodology. He even wrote his Master’s thesis about this topic.
• Workshop 2: Closing The Loop
  Who could be better than Lalit Wangikar from CKM Advisors, USA, to discuss about closing the loop. His team won the BPI Challenge 2012 due to their “successful conversion of analysis results in digestible business level results and recommendations”⁴.
• Workshop 3: Business Value
  Walter Vanherle from bpi3, Belgium, is no stranger to ROI and business value, with more than 30 years of consulting experience. He will share their own value impact template format to kickstart the discussion.
• Workshop 4: Mining for Auditors
  Youri Soons from Auditdienst Rijk, Netherlands, presents a concrete approach about process mining for auditors earlier at camp. Talk shop and compare practices with other auditors in his expedition.
• Workshop 5: IT Service Management
  Roy van Wel from the Ministry of Defense, Netherlands, is the perfect host for the IT Service Management workshop. He has recently completed a detailed case study on improving service level controls with process mining at a company.
• Workshop 6: Healthcare Mining
  Ronny Mans from TU Eindhoven, Netherlands, is without a doubt the single-most experienced person in the area of healthcare mining. He has written his PhD thesis about the topic and is currently working on process mining in his postdoc project with several hospitals.
• Workshop 7: Setting Up Shop
  You probably still remember Frank van Geffen from the Rabobank, Netherlands, from last year’s camp. With several process mining projects inside the Rabobank, he is the expert about setting up shop and can tell a story or two about how to master organizational barriers.
• Workshop 8: Adding Data
  Hajo Reijers from the TU Eindhoven / Perceptive, Netherlands, has always liked to combine research and practice. This is why is interested in adding data (quality information, geographic tagging, cost break-downs, you name it) to make process mining more meaningful.
• Workshop 9: Customer Experience
  Shaun Moran from Customer Dimension Analytics, Ireland, already applied process mining in the context of customer experience management when he was still at eBay. He has more than 16 years of experience to contribute to the discussion.
• Workshop 10: Forensics and Mining
  Thomas Stocker from Freiburg University, Germany, has published several articles on process mining and security. He is the ideal person to join for discussing all kinds of ideas to connect forensics and mining.
• Workshop 11: Social Mining
  Alberto Manuel from Process Sphere, Portugal, is one of the most forward-looking and opinionated BPM experts I know. In the social mining workshop he is ready to discuss the importance of social network analysis to get to the bottom of organizational change.
• Workshop 12: Industry Meets Academia
  Arthur ter Hofstede from Queensland University of Technology, Australia, is used to connecting research to practice by way of their QUT business courses, consulting and research projects. Discuss with him how to make industry meets academia cooperations a success.
• Workshop 13: Open Source Development
  Boudewijn van Dongen from TU Eindhoven, Netherlands, is the mastermind behind ProM and the best person to discuss about all things open source development for process mining. He also initiated the main process mining competition, the BPI Challenge.
• Workshop 14: Standardizing Log Data
  Eric Verbeek from TU Eindhoven, Netherlands, is the project lead of ProM, and with the current IEEE accredidation of XES deep into standardizing log data. Discuss what features a log standard needs, directly with the organizer of the XES standard working group.

Regardless of which expedition workshop you are going to attend, you will be in great company. You will get the chance to really connect to your expedition host and the other campers in your group, and get direct access to their vast experience. Dive deep into your favorite process mining topic, participate in a relaxed and open discussion, and make new friends!

Sign up to camp now to choose your three favorite workshop topics.

1. Like healthcare or auditing. ↩
2. We will try to keep the workshops even smaller, maybe around 5 – 7 participants. ↩
3. If the weather is nice, of course. ↩
4. A quote from the awards ceremony. ↩

As a warm-up for Process Mining Camp, we asked some of the speakers for an up-front interview. Previously, we already spoke with Tijn van Heijden and Walter Vanherle. Today, you can read the fireside chat with Lalit Wangikar below.

Lalit Wangikar, a partner at the NYC-based CKM Advisors, is an experienced strategic consultant and analytics expert.

His team won the Business Process Intelligence Challenge 2012 due to their successful conversion of analysis results into business level recommendations.

Interview with Lalit

Anne: Can you still remember where and when you first heard about process mining? What exactly caught your attention and fascinated you about the topic?

Lalit: While helping clients improve operations performance, we would frequently conduct a process mapping exercise to understand what resources worked on and how. There are inherent challenges in conducting process mapping the traditional way, the biggest challenge being your reliance on interviews as a means of understanding the process. As an analytics practitioner, I started looking for data driven ways of conducting these process discovery workshops. When I read about process mining the first time around, about 2 years ago, the first feeling was: “I wish I knew of this while doing the last several projects!”.

The most fascinating part of process mining is its use of data to shine the light on real processes that exist in the organization, and the intuitive representation of that reality in a form that is easily understood: Process maps. As a data geek, I am excited that this discipline helps organizations understand process reality in an objective way.

Anne: What is the biggest challenge of using interviews to understand the process? Why is it so difficult?

Lalit: Interviews are very critical to understanding the business context, but are poor vehicles for establishing the “truth” on process maps. Interviews are subject to all the whims human recollection is subject to: specifically, recency, simplification and self preservation. Things in the recent past take precedence; we try to simplify so as to be able to explain to others and preserve order in communication; and finally, we try to project ourselves in the best possible light. Additionally, one can not get a comprehensive picture that covers all different possibilities: Interviews focus on the “average” and some exceptions. Interview-based process discovery, therefore, leaves out a lot of “outliers” that usually end up being one of the biggest opportunity area.

Process mining provides an unbiased, fact-based, and a very comprehensive understanding of actual process execution.

Anne: Absolutely. I look forward to hearing more about that in your presentation. What else will you be talking about at camp?

Lalit: I am looking forward to share my experiences in using Process Mining techniques in a couple of client projects. I would like to share how Process mining became a critical part of an overall operations performance improvement effort. I am interested in understanding how we need to combine other disciplines, such as traditional process redesign, productivity improvement and statistical analysis, with process mining to develop more complete solutions for businesses. Equally importantly, I am looking to learn from experiences of other practitioners.

Anne: Thanks, Lalit! We can’t wait to have you here!

Would you like to hear more from Lalit about his experiences? Are you interested in sharing first-hand knowledge with fellow process miners? Register now to reserve your seat at Process Mining Camp on 28 May in Eindhoven. We only have a strictly limited number of tickets, and they are going fast…

In less than two weeks, we will have our Process Mining Camp here in Eindhoven. If you haven’t signed up yet, make sure you do before the end of this week to also get your official camp t-shirt!

Like last year, the heart and soul of Process Mining Camp will be our practice talks — candid presentations from experienced process miners in which they share their ideas, stories, and their tricks. To give you a sneak preview, we are having fireside chats with our practice talk speakers here on our blog. Today, we bring you the interview with Walter Vanherle, who will also guide one of our workshops. Enjoy!

Interview with Walter

Today, you can read the interview with Walter Vanherle, managing partner at bpi3 in Belgium. Walter is a passionate business management professional with almost 30 years of consulting experience. He has solved lots of customer problems and is quick to pin down the business value of process mining in gaining insight into the true processes.

Anne: Can you still remember where and when you first heard about process mining? What exactly caught your attention and fascinated you about the topic?

Walter: I remember that very well. Prof. dr. Koen Vanhoof, who is also a member of the advisory board of the Business Intelligence Community in Belgium, invited me to a lecture in May 2012. The Subject was Big Data and Process Mining. It was organized to honor prof. dr. Wil van der Aalst, on whom the degree of ‘doctor honoris causa’ was conferred by Hasselt University, Faculty of Business Economics. That lecture sparked my business interest. I then spent the summer by laying my eyes and hands on anything on the subject, including experimenting with ProM. Being a fellow from the University of Leuven, I also got in touch with professors and PhD students on the subject. Starting a business service using data and process mining was a fact. A little later we got in touch.

Anne: Yes, I remember you really dived into the topic and picked everything up very quickly. Where do you see process mining helping the most? What is the key benefit in your view?

Walter: My take to that question would be Where and Who would We help the most. Where would process mining help the most are the business functions dealing with operations. In particular, there are the operational questions: What is going wrong or what can go wrong. Business signals leading to the ‘what is going wrong’ question are, for example, complaints or dissatisfaction signals from suppliers, clients or employees, or unexpected turns of KPIs such as churn, customer loyalty, and more.

The second question, the Who, is easy in theory but difficult in practice. In theory, business function owners are, or should be, the most interested. In practice, since the outcome is not predefined and data is sometimes difficult to get, projects are difficult to plan and budget. In business, if the outcome is not crystal clear, the business owner needs to have a big problem and/or the business owner needs to have guts and/or money. You also have believers. Believers at both sides.

That’s where We come in. Think about the movie of Jerry Maguire: “Show me the money!”. Process mining is a technique most of the business owners are unfamiliar with. Hence they are first somewhat sceptical, even sometimes flabbergasted, when seeing the business cases you bring. We need to help them with the determination of the possible returns, which is the key question. This is our job, the We job.

As for the key benefit, for myself the answer to that question is within a picture I learned in one of the process mining seminars organised by SAI in Belgium. The picture provides a view on a Business Process Lifecycle starting from the identification of the process. Until recently, it was hard to discover the real process flow, analyze or measure performance and conformance. That’s the key benefit of process mining: A measurable execution of process flows, including monitoring the effect after (re-)design and implementation.

Lets also be straight that commercial, the real commercial, application of the discipline is becoming known but it is not yet common knowledge. It is gaining interest, that is for sure. Business experts with both experience on the application of process mining technology and the ability of linking this to business impact are in creation.

Business is getting a new instrument in their hands that has the promise to be able the loosen the controls in all kinds of compliance and regulated executions that are, potentially, and in some cases it is the reality, killing speed and flexibility in process execution. Business is getting an instrument in hand to better measure a real, running operation, to be able to do business more flexibly, streamlined, or in a more simple way.

Anne: At camp, you will talk about two concrete case studies, where you used process mining to measure SLA-based KPIs. You will also be helping out in one of our new expedition workshops, where a discussion group will take on the topic of business value and ROI. What can people expect from that workshop?

Walter: Business cases and business scenarios, including impact classification and impact quantification, are important to show the business what they can expect from the efforts of doing a process mining analysis. If process discovery and data exploration are to become a new norm, I expect business responsibles wanting to measure and determine the cost/benefit ratios. They want to have effort/return indications knowing which of the possible improvement initiatives to start first, or to start at all, following the process mining effort.

In line with the expedition theme, the workshop will be of an explorative nature. I have my views on how process mining-based improvement suggestions can be quantified and am curious how others approach topics such as business case, business scenario, cost/benefit, effort/return, impact classification, and impact quantification. I’ll also share our value impact template (VIT) format, which we use in our own projects to estimate the value impact of specific improvement initiatives, to kickstart the discussion.

Anne: Thanks, Walter! It will be great to see you at camp!

Would you like to hear more from Walter about his experiences? Are you interested in sharing first-hand knowledge with fellow process miners? Register now to reserve your seat at Process Mining Camp on 28 May in Eindhoven. We only have a strictly limited number of tickets, and they are going fast…

Process Mining is a relatively intuitive technology. Especially with a great tool like Disco, you can start analyzing your process and produce your first process maps within minutes. Yet, without some background knowledge and experience, it is sometimes easy to get stuck at some point. How can you make sure your data is optimal for analysis? When do you use which filters, and what do they do exactly?

Our Process Mining Master Class gets you ready for productively applying process mining and enables you to turn your business questions into actionable insight. Whether you are just starting out, or you have already evaluated process mining software – our training picks you up where you are, and gets you to a point where you can stop thinking about tools, and start thinking about solutions.

Get inspired at camp — then, get started next day!

This year, we offer a special edition of our Process Mining Master Class on Wednesday, 29 May (the day after Process Mining Camp).

In this one-day course, we combine theoretical knowledge, practical methodology, and hands-on software training to provide you with a solid foundation about what process mining is, how it works, and what it can (and cannot) do. For the practical part you will use our process mining software Disco. You will be fluent in using Disco and able to approach unknown data sets for your own process mining analysis after this course.

• Learn from renowned process mining expert Anne Rozinat.
• Get a solid theoretical foundation for process mining.
• Understand the strengths and weaknesses of process mining, and how to make it work for you.
• Learn how to approach new data and prepare it for analysis.
• Master different process mining analysis views and drill down with filters.
• Translate business questions into process mining routines.
• Learn how to get the most from Disco, our powerful process mining software, in compact hands-on sessions.
• Bring your own data, and let us help you analyze it.
• Take Disco home for 60 days, and put it to work for you.

This master class is the perfect companion and follow-up for Process Mining Camp, especially for those of you who are coming from farther away. For a special fee of only € 495,-¹, you get a full day of hands-on process mining training with all the theoretical background you need, from one of the world’s most renowned experts on process mining. And even more, this price does not only include Process Mining Camp, but also a full Disco license for 60 days, so you can get right to work after you get home!

The Master Class training will be given by Dr. Anne Rozinat. Anne has more than 10 years of experience with process mining and process mining projects, and has obtained her PhD Cum Laude in the process mining group of Wil van der Aalst at Eindhoven University of Technology. In her role as process mining lecturer at business schools such as Tias Nimbas in the Netherlands, she has been consistently ranked as excellent by the students.

Come aboard!

If you have been thinking about attending a process mining training, this is the one for you. You get a tried and tested course, given by a renowned process mining expert, plus the best process mining software Disco for two months.
— all for the special price of only € 495,-.

To make sure that you get as much out of this training as possible, this master class is strictly limited to 10 participants. Sign up now to reserve your seat!

Whether you decide to join our Master Class or not, you should really come to Process Mining Camp 2013! Register now to reserve your seat at Process Mining Camp on 28 May in Eindhoven. We only have a limited number of tickets, and they are going fast…

1. excl. VAT ↩

Are you as excited about Process Mining Camp as we are? Only two more weeks, and then we will shake the foundations of the Zwarte Doos and light the process mining fire in Eindhoven!

As a warm-up, and to get us all in the proper camp spirit, we asked some of the speakers for an up-front interview. Read the first fireside chat with Tijn van der Heijden below!

But first, allow me to point your attention towards an important deadline:

Register before 19 May to get a camp t-shirt!

At last year’s camp, we made fancy camp t-shirts for our speakers and staff, and lots of other campers asked us if they could also get one. This year, we decided to give every attendee a stylish, official camp t-shirt to take home. We will only print a limited batch, and printing t-shirts takes its sweet time. Fortunately, we have found a great printer here in Eindhoven who will screen-print each t-shirt lovingly by hand – and best of all, they agreed to print our batch last-minute.

This means that we can extend the early bird deadline to Sunday, 19 May! Please make sure to sign up for camp before the sun goes down on 19 May, otherwise you won’t have the shirt to prove you were indeed there. Impress your peers with your impeccable sense of fashion, and your membership to our exclusive club of process mining pioneers, and click here to sign up right away!

But of course, at Process Mining Camp the focus is not on haute couture, but on riveting and insightful practice talks! One of our speakers is Tijn van der Heijden, who has managed to both design a comprehensive process mining methodology, and apply it to get the Rabobank started with process mining, all in the course of his Master project. Read on to get a sneak preview of Tijn’s camp talk!

Interview with Tijn van der Heijden

Today, you can read the interview with Tijn van der Heijden, a business analyst with Deloitte. Tijn successfully introduced process mining as a new standard to achieve continious improvement for the Rabobank during his Master project. At camp, he will show you his process mining project methodology that starts with the questions that you have about your process.

Anne: Can you still remember where and when you first heard about process mining? What exactly caught your attention and fascinated you about the topic?

Tijn: Yes, my first experience with process mining was a couple of years ago during a BPM course for my Master at Eindhoven University of Technology. During a lecture and a demo with ProM I got explained about the basics and possibilities of process mining. It fascinated me that it was possible to get a process model and so much performance information out of automatically logged events of an information system.

Later that year I followed a specific course in process mining with which my interest in the topic grew. The final assignment of this course was supporting a company by retrieving as much valuable information as possible out of a complicated event log, draw conclusions and give recommendations where possible. I really loved to analyse the log and to think about how the company could improve their performance based on the derived information. That was when I decided to develop myself more elaborately in the field of process mining.

Anne: What kind of complicated event log was that? Was it a real-life data set?

Tijn: Yeah, it was an event log from a hospital about the activities that took place for treating patients, real spaghetti log. But I don’t remember that much detail anymore. Can imagine that you know / played a role in providing the log.

Anne: Oh I know! This must have been the BPI Challenge data set from 2011. It was the first year of the BPI Challenge, the annual process mining challenge. The data set was really scary and only three people submitted something. JC Bose won the challenge that year with his impressive trace alignment application.

When did you realize that you wanted to work on a methodology framework for process mining?

Tijn: My graduate supervisor, Hajo Reijers, brought me into contact with the manager of the Financial Services department of Rabobank Nederland. That manager had heard of process mining and was wondering if it could help him to improve the invoice process that he was responsible for. This was the chance where I was looking for, so I took this opportunity with both hands.

Preparing the process mining project in combination with making me more profound in the field of process mining by reading scientific literature, I notified that there was not much research in executing process mining projects for practice. A lot of the research on process mining is about developing algorithms, e.g. discover a process model or a social network, and structuring and interpreting the mined data. The little literature that is about applying process mining is almost always written from a scientific point of view. Due to this, not much information could be found on supporting organizations in applying process mining to improve their processes. By developing a process mining methodology meant to use in practice, I hoped to support practitioners in conducting process mining projects and to create a deliverable that shares insights and could be further developed and improved by others.

About a month later, at Process Mining Camp 2012, Christian Günther pointed out that the process mining community is still lacking a certain kind of commonly agreed methodology that shares best practices and describes a way how to apply process mining. For me this confirmed the value of my research topic and stimulated me to contribute to that methodology.

Anne: Thank you, Tijn! We look forward to hearing more about the specific steps in your methodology, and about its application at the Rabobank, in your talk at camp!