Before answering your analysis questions, you need to get an overview of your process. Where does it start, and where does it end? Can you recognize the expected process? Is there a little or a lot of variation? Do you see rework or other unexpected patterns?

This initial explorative analysis is more of an art than a science. To help you build up your experience, in the next Process Mining Café, Rudi and Anne will take you on a journey to discover two different processes. We show you step by step how you explore the process, make sure you understand it, and get the data ready for your analysis. Join us!

The café takes place tomorrow, Wednesday, 11 December, at 15:00 CET (Check your timezone here). As always, you don’t need to register. Point your browser to fluxicon.com/cafe when it is time.

Sign up for the café mailing list here to receive a reminder one hour before the session starts. Or add the time to your calendar if you don’t want to miss it.

The new dates for our Process Mining Trainings 2025 are out!

Most of you know already that process mining is not magic. It is hard work that requires a smart human analyst to interpret what they are seeing. But it surely looks like magic, and you will be able to dazzle others and have exciting new perspectives on your business processes.

At Fluxicon, we have more than 20 years of experience with process mining. We use that knowledge to build the best process mining software for professionals. We are also busy capturing the best practices in our process mining book and shaping the process mining methodology together with all of you in our annual Process Mining Camp and the monthly Process Mining Cafe.

But the most direct way to benefit from our experience is to join one of our hands-on trainings. Here is what you need to know about our process mining trainings:

• Our trainings are live. This means that the lessons are not pre-recorded. Instead, you join the teacher and the other participants in interactive web meetings.

• The groups are deliberately small. So, you can be sure to be able to bring in your own topics. You will also learn from the questions of your peers, who often have a different perspective than you.

• Our trainings are really practical. You will learn all the essential concepts of process mining in practice. This training will give you the basis to use the full potential of process mining in your work.

• No prior knowledge is required. We will start from scratch, so don’t worry if you are totally new. But even if you already have some experience with process mining you will benefit, because there is a lot to know!

• The training does not end after two weeks. We meet with the same training group after 1-2 months to discuss the first results. Afterwards, we stay in contact and keep supporting you on your process mining journey.

Dates

Each training consists of four two-hour sessions over the course of two weeks. In between the sessions, there are exercises to apply what you have learned.

The next available training dates are (click on the month below and scroll down to enroll):

• January 2025 Training: Mo 20 January, Thu 23 January, Mo 27 January, and Thu 30 January at 15:00 until 17:00 CET each day.

• March 2025 Training: Mo 17 March, Thu 20 March, Mo 24 March, and Thu 27 March at 15:00 until 17:00 CET each day.

• May 2025: There is no training in May as this is the month of our annual Process Mining Camp! Camp takes place next year on Thu 15 May and Fr 16 May in Eindhoven, the Netherlands (with an optional pre-training Boot Camp on Wed 14 May) –> Sign up at the camp mailing list to be notified about the program as soon as it is available.

• June 2025 Training: Mo 16 June, Thu 19 June, Mo 23 June, and Thu 26 June at 15:00 until 17:00 CEST each day.

• September 2025 Training: Mo 15 September, Thu 18 September, Mo 22 September, and Thu 25 September at 15:00 until 17:00 CEST each day.

• November 2025 Training: Mo 17 November, Thu 20 November, Mo 24 November, and Thu 27 November at 15:00 until 17:00 CET each day.

Make 2025 the year you get serious about bringing the magic of process mining into your organization and reserve your seat now!

I recently spoke with a customer who had built a complicated SQL query to remove certain activities from their event log. He wanted to measure the process from one step in the process to another step in the process.

When I asked him if he knew how to do this in Disco he said “No no, you don’t understand. The two steps I want to measure are in the middle of the process”. My response was “Yes exactly! Let me show you how you can easily do this”.

He was amazed and this now saves him a lot of pre-processing time. Maybe some of you also don’t know how to focus your analysis between two steps. So, we recorded a 3-minute video to show you how.

You know the saying: 80% of the time and effort is spent on data preparation and only 20% on analysis. In the latest Process Mining Café, we spoke with Xixi Lu from Utrecht University about her categorization of common preprocessing tasks in process mining.

Xixi and Anne looked at all the six categories: Enriching, Integration, Filtering, Transformation, Reduction, and Abstraction. For each of the categories, we present concrete examples. So, in this episode, you get to see a lot of different types of preprocessing (see also the extensive list of pointers in the links below).

We discussed how these six categories that they distilled from their literature review align with the practical data preparation tasks we see daily. It has been a fascinating discussion. You don’t want to miss this one, especially if you are a science and terminology nerd!

You can now watch the recording here if you weren’t at the live broadcast or want to re-watch the café. A big thanks to Xixi and all of you for joining us!

Links

Here are the links that we mentioned during the session:

• Y. Liu, V. Stein Dani, I. Beerepoot, and X. Lu. Turning Logs into Lumber: Preprocessing Tasks in Process Mining, BPM Workshops (2023)

• M.L. van Eck, X. Lu, S.J.J. Leemans, W.M.P. Van Der Aalst: PM^2: A Process Mining Project Methodology. International conference on advanced information systems engineering. pp. 297–313. Springer (2015)

• S. Suriadi, R. Andrews, A.H.M. ter Hofstede, M.T. Wynn: Event log imperfection patterns for process mining: Towards a systematic approach to cleaning event logs. Information Systems 64, 132–150 (2017)

• N. Martin. Data quality in process mining. Interactive process mining in healthcare, 53-79. (2021).

• Our data quality checklist for process mining helps you to spot and fix problems with your data.

• One of the examples for the enriching category is the unfolding of case loops by adding a sequence counter column.

• Another example is the unfolding of loops for activity repetitions.

• Integration can happen in many different forms. The simplest scenario is to combine data sets of the same shape.

• Further examples can be found in the Process Mining Café about analysis transformations.

• Guideline for when to remove outliers and when to keep them.

• A.J.M.M. Weijters, W.M.P. van der Aalst, A.K. Alves De Medeiros. Process mining with the HeuristicsMiner algorithm, BETA working paper Vol. 166 (2006)

• Removing spider activities is an example of filtering noise.

• In Disco, you transform the activity or case ID configuration simply by importing your data set from a different perspective.

• Another example of transforming is the export into another event log format.

• Our data suitability checklist helps you determine whether your data set is usable for process mining in its current form.

• Sampling is often necessary for customer journey analyses.

• Another form of reduction is splitting the log into different sub-logs.

• C.W. Günther and W.M.P. van der Aalst. Fuzzy Mining – Adaptive Process Simplification Based on Multi-perspective Metrics. BPM Conference (2007)

• S.J. van Zelst, F. Mannhardt, M. de Leoni, A. Koschmider: Event Abstraction in Process Mining: Literature Review and Taxonomy. Granular Computing 6(3), 719–736 (2021)

• Our Process Mining Café with Pnina Soffer, Barbara Weber, and Francesca Zerbato about the process of process mining.

• A combination of preprocessing tasks is relabeling activity names (integration and enriching).

• D. Fahland: Extracting and Pre-Processing Event Log. CoRR abs/2211.04338 (2022)

• H.M. Marin-Castro, E. Tello-Leal: Event Log Preprocessing for Process Mining: A Review. Applied Sciences 11(22), 10556 (2021)

Contact us anytime at cafe@fluxicon.com if you have questions or suggestions for the café.

Have you seen that the Process Mining Café is also available as a podcast? So, if you prefer to listen to our episodes in your favorite podcast player, you can get them all here.

Sign up for our café mailing list and the YouTube playlist, follow Fluxicon on LinkedIn, or add the café calendar to never miss a Process Mining Café in the future.

Some preprocessing tasks can be easily done in Disco. Others require the use of data transformation tools. What are the common preprocessing tasks for process mining, and how can you group them?

We have invited Xixi Lu from Utrecht University for this month’s Process Mining Café to discuss her classification, why preprocessing is separate from data quality, and how to distinguish between noise and outliers. We get practical and show you examples. Join us!

The café takes place tomorrow, Wednesday, 13 November, at 15:00 CET (Check your timezone here). As always, you don’t need to register. Point your browser to fluxicon.com/cafe when it is time.

Sign up for the café mailing list here to receive a reminder one hour before the session starts. Or add the time to your calendar if you don’t want to miss it.