A Case Study on Analyzing Inter-organizational Business Processes from EDI Messages Using Physical Activity Mining

In order to achieve their goals, organizations collaborate with business partners. Such collaborations represent enactments of inter-organizational business processes and may be supported through the exchange of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) messages (e.g., electronic purchase orders, invoices etc.). For gaining insights on such processes, recently two distinct approaches for enabling the application of process mining techniques on inter-organizational business processes based on the interchanged EDI messages have been proposed: (i) Message Flow Mining (MFM) and (ii) Physical Activity Mining (PAM). In this paper, we present a case study in which we apply the PAM methodology on a real-world EDI data set obtained from a German manufacturer of consumer goods. Our results demonstrate potential insights that can be gained from applying process mining techniques in the context of inter-organizational business processes.