EDIminer: A Toolset for Process Mining from EDI Messages

Organizations exchange data electronically to perform business transactions using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). In order to gain insights on such transactions, approaches for inter-organizational business process mining based on the observation of exchanged EDI messages have been recently proposed. In recent approaches, however, only meta-information about the exchanged messages, such as message type, interchange time and sender/receiver information, has been used as data base for generating event logs. This neglects the opportunity of using business information from observed EDI messages to arrive at more detailed event logs, which in turn enable mining of detailed process models and fine-grained process performance analyses. In addressing this shortcoming, we present EDIminer, a toolset that allows for (i) enhanced visualization of contents of EDI messages, (ii) automatic and/or user-driven definition of mappings of EDI artifacts to events, (iii) generation of events from such mappings, (iv) semi-automatic correlation of events to process instances and (v) generation of industry-standard XES event logs for subsequent application of conventional process mining techniques. We demonstrate the utility of EDIminer by means of an exemplary EDI-based purchase order process based on real-world data.