Analyzing interconnected processes: using object-centric process mining to analyze procurement processes

Abstract

The purchase-to-pay (P2P) process is one of the core business processes in any organization. It ensures the correct and efficient provisioning of materials and services. An efficient P2P process reduces operational costs by ensuring discounts, avoiding late payments, and choosing the optimal supplier for the goods. Process mining techniques help practitioners optimize the execution of P2P processes by analyzing the execution data and providing useful insights. However, existing techniques may result in misleading insights due to many-to-many relationships between business objects, e.g., between orders and invoices in the P2P process. Recently, object-centric process mining techniques have been proposed to avoid the limitations of traditional process mining techniques. In this paper, we present a case study on a real-life P2P process using object-centric process mining techniques. To that end, we adopt the well-known PM2 process mining project methodology to the object-centric setting and analyze the performance and compliance.