Process Mining for Electronic Data Interchange

Choreography modeling and service integration received a lot of attention in the last decade. However, most real-world implementations of inter-organizational systems are still realized by traditional Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards. In traditional EDI standards, the notion of process or choreography is not explicitly specified. Rather, every business document exchange stands for its own. This lack of process awareness in traditional EDI systems hinders organizations from applying Business Process Management (BPM) methods in such settings. To address this shortcoming, we seek to derive choreographies from EDI message exchanges. Thereby, we employ and extend process mining techniques, which have so far concentrated on business processes within single organizations. We discover the interaction sequences between the partners as well as the business information conveyed in the exchanged documents, which goes beyond the state-of-the-art in process mining. As a result, we lift the information gained on the IT level to the business level. This enables us to derive new insights that help organizations to improve their performance, e.g., an organization may get insights into the value of its business partnerships to support an efficient decision making process. This way we hope to bring the merits of BPM to inter-organizational systems realized by traditional EDI standards.