The Rise of Object-Centric Process Mining

What is Object-Centric Process Mining?

SSON’s Process Mining and Intelligence Virtual Summit took place last month and highlighted some of the biggest innovations in the process transformation space. The first session of the day was kicked off by probably the best-known speaker in the field Prof Wil. Van Der Aalst who presented an engaging talk breaking down what object-centric process mining is.

Evolution From Case-Centric to Object-Centric Process Mining

The attention to processes has been around for a long while. The evolution of process mining, a term first coined by Van Der Aalst in a research proposal in the 1990s, has progressed significantly since this time. Previously, workflow management systems and process mining solutions were believed to be the benchmark for the future. This perspective shifted when previous leading process models, revealed themselves to have ‘deadlocks’, endless loops, and ‘dead parts.’ They were shown to be an ‘over-simplification’ of reality, only handling ‘happy paths’ and leaving tricky paths having to be handled manually. At the end of the 90s Van Der Aalst, decided to analyze event data to uncover the actual process. This revealed bottlenecks, deviations, and process problems that were not visible before. Object-Centric Process Mining (OCPM) now lifts process analytics to a whole new level.

Enhanced Data Utilization for Object-Centric Process Improvement

It all starts with event data. At a minimum, the case ID, the activity that took place and the timestamp can be extracted easily for information. Whilst case-centric process mining would analyze the data for one single case, such as orders, this oversimplification didn’t encompass the “multitude of interconnected objects and events.” This could involve not just the order itself but also the delivery, items, shipments, suppliers and the list goes on. Utilizing OCPM, users try to untangle the data to reveal the countless variants there are, referring to activities related to a particular order. Through disentanglement, variants can be reduced significantly, and the structure can be exploited to generate insights that are helpful and can improve processes.

Transparency and Diagnostic Capabilities of Object-Centric Process Mining

OCPM enhances transparency through processing multiple interactions and in return offering a single system and agnostic source of truth. It creates 3-D versions of data to visualize any version of the process you would like to see and displays issues from different angles. Diagnosing problems this way avoids the repetition of having to go back to source systems for answers.

These are just a few takeaways from the session with Van Der Aalst. To listen to the presentation in its entirety you can view the session on-demand above. Alternatively, to learn more about process mining please join our Process and Continuous Improvement Virtual Summit in February 2025.