ERP Post Implementation Review with Process Mining: A Case of Procurement Process

This paper promotes the use of process mining and root-cause analysis from BPM field to conduct post implementation review of ERP implementation at business process level. First, literature on ERP post implementation, measure of success, ERP lifecycle and process mining are reviewed. Then, a case study on a agricultural chemicals company that recently implemented an ERP systems is conducted. The focus of the case study is procurement process in the company. Interviews are conducted with procurement staffs in the company to obtain the standard procurement process. Then, data is extracted and structured into event logs. The event log is processed with Disco to discover the process model. Analysis was done to discover the normal and unusual paths in procurement process. ERP implementation is expected to increase efficiency of the procurement operation in terms of cycle time reduction. The process mining results show that some of the activities are very uncontrolled i.e. sometimes it can be done in a short time but in other cases it took a long time. The activity can be done quickly because the procedure is bypassed. The bottlenecks occur due to technical issues (error in the systems), data migration issues (the introduction of new material numbering and categories) and cultural issues (high dependency of hard copy approval). These issues need to be resolved so that the company can realize the operational efficiency benefit and eventually long-term strategic benefit of ERP implementation.