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Analyzing inter-organizational business processes

Process mining and business performance analysis using electronic data interchange messages

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Abstract

Companies are increasingly embedded in B2B environments, where they have to collaborate in order to achieve their goals. Such collaborations lead to inter-organizational business processes that may be commonly supported through the exchange of electronic data interchange (EDI) messages (e.g., electronic purchase orders, invoices etc.). Despite the appearance of XML, traditional approaches to EDI, such as EDIFACT and ANSI X.12, still play an overwhelmingly dominant role. However, such traditional EDI standards lack a notion of process. In other words, the exchanged business documents are typically not embedded in the context of other exchanged business documents. This has two shortcomings: (1) the inability to apply proven business process management (BPM) methods, including process mining techniques, in such settings; and (2) the unavailability of systematic approaches to business intelligence (BI) using information from exchanged EDI messages. In this article, we present the EDImine Framework for enabling (1) the application of process mining techniques in the field of EDI-supported inter-organizational business processes, and (2) for supporting inter-organizational performance evaluation using business information from EDI messages, event logs and process models. As an enabling technology, we present a method for the semantic preprocessing of EDIFACT messages to exploit this potentially rich source of information by applying state of the art BPM and BI techniques. We show the applicability of our approach by means of a case study based on real-world EDI data of a German consumer goods manufacturing company.

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Notes

  1. An EDI artifact can be defined as any structural element or concrete value conveying some piece of business information in an EDI message; hence, their specific manifestation may vary between different EDI standards. For instance, in the case of EDIFACT the term may refer to qualified or non-qualified data elements, segments, segment groups, message types, etc. (Berge 1994).

  2. Here, KB is used as an acronym for Knowledge Base.

  3. http://scholar.google.com.

  4. http://www.unece.org/trade/untdid/d96a/content.htm.

  5. http://www.unece.org/trade/untdid/d01b/content.htm.

  6. We refrain from specifying units since all monetary figures and quantity figures have been altered in this article.

  7. We specify critical thresholds as relative values (i.e., threshold\(_\Delta\)) with respect to target values in order to allow for the simple definition of thresholds for two-sided KPIs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Robert Engel, Worarat Krathu, Marco Zapletal, Christian Pichler, R. P. Jagadeesh Chandra Bose, Wil van der Aalst, Hannes Werthner & Christian Huemer

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  1. Robert Engel
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  2. Worarat Krathu
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  3. Marco Zapletal
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  4. Christian Pichler
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Correspondence to Robert Engel.

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Engel, R., Krathu, W., Zapletal, M. et al. Analyzing inter-organizational business processes. Inf Syst E-Bus Manage 14, 577–612 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-015-0295-2

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