To get ready for this year’s Process Mining Camp (sign up here to be notified once the registration opens very soon!), you can now watch the recordings of Process Mining Camp 2021.

While this year’s camp takes place in Eindhoven again, we were still gathering online last year. For one week, we spent two relaxed hours of process mining per day on the internet together, with a mix of practice talks, lab sessions, and Process Mining Cafés.

Here are the recordings of the opening keynote, Daan’s practice talk, and the process mining café from the first day.

Welcome & Opening Keynote

We looked back at the talks from the past nine years of Process Mining Camp, and we categorized them into industries and use cases. Categorizations into industries are helpful if you want to see examples of how other companies in your line of business have used process mining. Another way, however, to look at these same case studies and camp talks is to group them into use cases. A use case is less concerned about the industry where you apply process mining. Instead, it focuses on who is using process mining and why.

It is helpful to look at process mining examples from this perspective because it helps you understand how process mining fits into the methodologies you already use (and how it will change your current way of working). For example, process improvement teams often work with the DMAIC approach from Lean Six Sigma, or the PDCA cycle. Auditors have their own procedures. Based on three examples, we show how you can integrate process mining into these existing methodologies.

Analysts and Domain Experts are Complements

The first practice talk was given by Daan Jabroer from Volksbank in the Netherlands. Volksbank is a Dutch bank that includes brands such as SNS, ASN Bank, RegioBank, and BLG Wonen. Daan is a business improvement consultant at Volksbank.

For more than eleven years, Daan has worked on architecting, (re)designing, modeling, and improving the business processes at various banks. The processes are constantly changing, and process mining is a great tool to explore the impact of these changes over time. However, for Daan, the real value lies in the collaboration between the process mining analyst and the domain expert. During the first quarter of 2020, the mortgage provisioning lead time was above the stated limit. Daan shows how only the process analyst and the domain expert together can solve the problem.

Process Mining Café: Mind the Gap

For the daily Process Mining Café, our speakers of the day were joined by old friends from previous process mining camps. On Monday, Daan and Anne got together with Sudhendu Rai, from AIG in the United States. Sudhendu is Head of Data-Driven Process Optimization in AIG’s Investments organization and combined process mining with discrete-event simulation in the past.

Does it make a difference which improvement methodology is used with process mining? How do you best explain process mining to others? And how do you ensure that the right actions are taken after the analysis?

Together with Sudhendu and Daan, we discuss the typical questions and the daily challenges of a process improvement practitioner working with process mining.

Stay tuned for the videos from the following days of camp.

Process Mining Camp takes place on Thursday, 23 June 2022. Add the time to your calendar and sign up for the camp mailing list here not to miss anything about this year’s camp!

Join us for our last Process Mining Café before Process Mining Camp and the following summer break this Wednesday!

Together with our guest Fred van Middendorp from Heijmans, Rudi, and I will talk about project vs. process thinking. Project-driven organizations like construction companies approach everything from a project perspective. However, process improvement initiatives require process awareness. How do you deal with this as a process mining practitioner?

Discuss with us this week, Wednesday 18 May, at 16:00 CEST! (Check your timezone here). As always, there is no registration required. Simply point your browser to fluxicon.com/cafe when it is time. You can watch the café and join the discussion while we are on the air, right there on the café website.

Tune in live for Process Mining Café by visiting fluxicon.com/cafe this week, Wednesday 18 May, at 16:00 CEST! Add the time to your calendar if you don’t want to miss it. Or sign up for the café mailing list here if you want us to remind you one hour before the session.

We are always excited to learn about new research from our academic partners. Today, we would like to highlight an interesting paper about the design and implementation of video-based process mining that Wolfgang Kratsch, Fabian König, and Maximilian Röglinger have published in the Decision Support Systems journal.

Manual activities often leave blind spots in the process analysis because you cannot see them in the data. Especially for manufacturing processes, there is an opportunity to use video data to fill these blind spots. The video data contains valuable process-related information, but there is no standardized approach to creating event logs from unstructured video data yet.

The authors developed a reference architecture that bridges the gap between computer vision and process mining. The computer vision capabilities that are the basis for extracting the process-related information from video data are shown in Figure 1 below (click on the image to see a larger version). The extracted low-level events are then aggregated to the level of detail required for the process mining use case.

Figure 1. Illustration of computer vision capabilities

You can freely access their paper until 17 June 2022 here. Thanks to Wolfgang, Fabian, and Maximilian for allowing us to share their research!

What if you had twice as many people? What if you didn’t do that process step? Simulation is such an exciting topic because it allows you to test complex “what if”-scenarios without having to make the change in the real world (yet).

In the latest Process Mining Café, we talked with Lambros Viennas from Bridgnorth Aluminium and Sudhendu Rai from AIG about combining process mining with simulation. Based on an example in Disco and AnyLogic, we show how you can use process mining as a starting point for your simulation model. If you missed the live broadcast or want to re-watch the café, you can now watch the recording here.

Thanks again to Sudhendu and Lambros and all of you for joining us!

Links

Here are the links that we mentioned during the session:

• How process mining compares to simulation

• Example of how the process structure and process parameters can be extracted from the process mining tool for the simulation

• Sudhendu’s presentation at Process Mining Camp 2019 shows how AIG could reduce the cycle time from 12 days to 5 days (increasing the throughput by over 30%) by combining process mining with simulation

• In his follow-up talk at Process Mining Camp 2020, Sudhendu talks more about how they used real-world data and discrete-event simulation optimization for improving insurance business processes within AIG

• Sudhendu’s “Process Wind Tunnel for Improving Business Process” talk at the Winter Simulation Conference 2021 (slides)

• Bruce Silver’s articles on making simulation useful and why simulation in most BPM tools is a fake feature

• Modeling, and thus simulating, human behavior is challenging. You can take a look at Chapter 9 in my Ph.D. thesis, this paper, and Wil’s Business Process Simulation Survival Guide as a starting point

• Lambros recommends this whole list of references to dive deeper into the literature

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

Summer is on the horizon, and that means one thing: It is time to dust off the old tent and get ready for this year’s Process Mining Camp on 23 June!

As any camper will tell you, process mining is not something you just own or buy — process mining is something we are doing. It is not just a tool but a discipline.

Some things you have to learn on your own, other things you can learn from books. But we learn best when we share experiences with our peers. When we get together and talk about how exactly we do process mining.

This one goes up to eleven

Ten years ago, we got together for the first Process Mining Camp, and it has been the highlight of our year ever since. At Process Mining Camp, you meet people who face the same challenges as you. You exchange experiences and learn from each other. And you might just make some new friends along the way.

After two years of online camps, we will hold this year’s Process Mining Camp in person again. While our talks are the backbone of the event, the whole camp experience is interactive, spontaneous, and personal. Plus, clearing your schedule and being away for camp allows you to be present in a very different way.

Thanks to our friends from the TU/e Process Analytics group, we will pitch our tents once again at the auditorium of the Technical University in Eindhoven, back where it all started.

We know that traveling to a conference requires more time and effort than tuning in to an online event. So, we will make sure that this trip is worth your while. To maximize your time with other process miners, we will have discussion roundtables in smaller groups and plenty of social time.

What’s on the menu

Here is what you can expect from this year’s camp:

• We are already working with some great speakers on their practice talks. So, the program will be top-notch. And of course, you can meet the speakers over coffee later in the day.

• You can join one of our discussion roundtables and go deeper on various process mining topics. The discussion groups will be small so that you meet and get to know everyone in your group.

• We will have a process mining clinic. Bring your most tricky process mining problems and get expert advice.

• There will be plenty of time for socializing so that you get the chance to catch up with everyone.

• By moving much of the camp outdoors, this will be the most summer-campy camp ever! We will even have a sort-of campfire in the form of a BBQ at the end of the day.

Join us for the tenth anniversary of the Process Mining Camp community!

Pull out your calendar now and mark Thursday, 23 June, as Process Mining Camp day! (add it to your calendar here)

Safe and sound

Of course, Corona is still in the air, and we do not have our heads in the sand. So, this is how we are going to make camp a safe experience for all of us.

The practice talks will be presented in a large, well-ventilated room with lots of space. We will provide masks, and we will all be wearing them indoors.

All the breaks, lunch, dinner, and coffee will be outside. Many parts of the camp program will also take place outdoors. So, you can breathe fresh air while conversing with your fellow process miners.

We want everybody to feel safe and comfortable at camp. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to let us know at camp@fluxicon.com.

Making the camp safe also means keeping the number of attendees lower than usual, which means that tickets will be even more limited this year. Be sure to sign up for our waiting list here, and we will give you a heads up right before we open registration very soon.

We can’t wait to see you in Eindhoven on 23 June!

— Your friends from Fluxicon