This article is part of a collection of process mining examples organized by use case. You can find the full overview here.
A common use case is the auditing use case. Here, an internal or external audit team analyzes the process with the goal to verify the compliance of the process with existing rules. Efficiency-related findings such as discovered bottlenecks may be shared with the audited business unit as added value but are not central for the audit team. Process mining can, however, also be used to make the audit team’s own auditing process more efficient and increase the level of assurance by basing their assessment on 100% of the data rather than samples.
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Case study series about auditing with process mining. We also recommend to watch this companion Process Mining Café, where the authors of the series walk us through the nine steps and explain how process mining changes the traditional audit approach in each phase.
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Jasmine Handler & Andreas Preslmayr from the City of Vienna audited one of Austria’s largest infrastructure groups: The Wiener Stadtwerke. They used process mining to evaluate the correctness, compliance, efficiency, and expediency of the control system. In the following Process Mining Café with Mieke Jans, we discussed audit standards, new definitions of materiality, and research on how auditors assign risk to deviations.
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Zsolt Varga from the European Court of Auditors shows the results from four different process mining projects at different agencies. See also his summary article on page 68 in this journal or its online version here.
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Mieke Jans and her colleagues wrote this case study about applying process mining during an audit at a bank after the regular internal audit had already taken place. They found many things that the internal audit team had not found.
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Dave Jansen and Wilco Brouwers from CZ developed a new approach for auditing their digital processes of the future. They show where they see differences compared to the traditional audit approach in the preparation, fieldwork, reporting, and follow-up steps in their audits. See also their IIA review here (only available in Dutch).
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Marc Gittler and Patrick Greifzu from DHL analyzed the parcel delivery process based on hundreds of millions of events. They also reduced their audit time by 25% in comparison to classical data analytics by using process mining to analyze the quality of their own audit process.
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Youri Soons from the Central Auditing Service in the Netherlands used process mining to make their audit work more efficient. It helps them to find abnormalities in a process (e.g., skipped steps or broken segregation of duties). The auditors can then focus on these exceptions.
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Erik Davelaar from KPMG demonstrates the added value of process mining for external auditors (and the auditees) this based on three different case studies.
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PGGM applies process mining with a multi-disciplinary team. This case study highlights one of their applications in audit, which makes the audit more efficient.
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Wim Leeuwenkamp from the Dutch Tax Office was at the first process mining camp and shared his experiences from a pilot project in the audit department of the Ministry of Finance. Gathering the data was not easy due to the legacy systems in the IT environment.
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Mieke Jans was also among the speakers at the very first process mining camp when she was still at Deloitte. She came back three years later and shared her approach of extracting process mining data from any ERP system.
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Audit Manager Stefan Michel investigated the data quality of a payment process at the Swiss National Bank (SNB). The results of the analysis show that the data that is available via the core banking platform, the Avaloq Banking System (ABS), is appropriate for process mining.