Automated Process Mining in Philippine Procurement Event Logs – Automated Process Flow Detection

“Process mining applies data science to discover, validate and improve workflows . By combining data mining and process analytics, organizations can mine log data from their information systems to understand the performance of their processes, revealing bottlenecks and other areas of improvement. “

(IBM, 2021).

A relatively new technology, process mining, is getting more and more popular due to increases and improvements in data production and management, and cloud technology. Companies and organization that use process mining can “see” the “current state” of their process workflow, and rapidly evaluate compliance to the “target” flows.

“Companies that adopt an incremental improvement approach, on the other hand, tend to spend too much time on analyzing the “as-is.” In addition, their current process analysis is frequently based on interviews and sticky notes, which executives sometimes regard as overly subjective and treat with justifiable skepticism. “

(Davenport and Spanyi, 2019)

Public procurement is a business process that is prone to corruption and administrative inefficiency, affecting the quality of service delivery to the public.  Using state university’s three-year procurement data as a sample, a paper published and presented by Layertech Labs in the 7th International Conference on Behavioural and Social Computing (BESC) – Bournemouth, United Kingdom, explores the use of process mining on publicly available procurement data to discover the underlying structure of procurement processes of government entities in the Philippines, check for conformance with the prescribed process in the procurement law, and identify potentially problematic nodes. 

In the paper, event logs were generated from official public procurement data and mined with heuristics-based process mining algorithm, using free, open-sourced tools. The discovered processes revealed a concept drift in publication of contract award, a point for inspection and improvement for the agencies involved.

Using the process miner, analysts were able to immediately detect and visualize drifts in the prescribed process, and pinpoint the specific process points (and actors) involved. Not only this technology will help speed up analysis, but the system will also allow LGUs, auditors, and even stakeholders to constantly monitor the state of their public procurement

To read the FULL PAPER (DOI: 10.1109/BESC51023.2020.9348306), go to IEEEExplore: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9348306

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References:

IBM (2021) What is Process Mining? Available at: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/process-mining (Accessed: 25 May 2021).

Davenport and Spanyi (2019) What is Process Mining and Why Should Companies do it? Available at: https://hbr.org/2019/04/what-process-mining-is-and-why-companies-should-do-it (Accessed: 25 May 2021).