A case study on the business benefits of automated process discovery

Automated process discovery represents the knowledge extraction phase of process mining. By exploiting transactional data from information systems, it aims to extract valuable process knowledge. Through process mining, an important link between two disciplines -- data mining and business process management -- has been established. However, while methods of both data mining and process management are well-established in practice, the potential of process mining for evaluation of business operations has only been recently recognised outside academia. Our quantitative analysis of real-life event log data investigates both the performance and social dimensions of a selected core business process of an Austrian IT service company. It shows that organisations can substantially benefit from adopting automated process discovery methods to visualise, understand and evaluate their processes. This is of particular relevance in today's world of data-driven decision making.