A research project, two internships and a world of opportunities
Aydin’s process mining journey began with an online course, but she soon realized that to “truly grasp the value” it could deliver, she needed real-world experience. She needed to apply the knowledge and techniques she was learning to actual business process data. And she wasn’t going to start small.
In 2022, she applied for a research grant from the prestigious TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye) 2209-B program, which funds undergraduate student projects. Her proposal, “Providing Sustainability and Efficiency by Applying Process Mining in the Industry,” was awarded funding in March 2023. And soon, she would be working alongside some of the world’s best process mining researchers and professionals, including Prof. van der Aalst, to help a multi-billion-dollar company streamline operations, reduce carbon emissions and deliver significant value.
Borusan Cat, a Türkiye-based heavy equipment dealer and part of the Borusan Group, started using Celonis in 2022 and was the industry partner for Aydin’s project. In July 2023, Aydin traveled to the city of Aachen in Germany for an Erasmus+ internship with the Process and Data Science (PADS) group at RWTH Aachen University.
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Sevde Aydin at RWTH Aachen University in 2023.
Over the next three months, she worked on her research project to analyze the company’s after-sales technical services process using process mining techniques. She worked with Gyunam Park, a PhD candidate in the PADS group, to implement object-centric process mining (OCPM) and completed the project with the support of Borusan Cat’s Digital & Technology and Process Excellence team. By looking at the daily activities and schedules of service technicians, Aydin was able to identify ways to improve their productivity and efficiency and reduce the carbon footprint of the process.
“We turned the case-centric event log into an object-centric event log using the one-to-many relationship between the ‘technician’ and the ‘schedule’ in the process by defining them as object types,” said Aydin. “After implementing object-centric process mining, we were able to do advanced analysis and identify bottlenecks in the process, such as conflicting schedules.” This analysis wasn’t possible with traditional, case-centric process mining techniques.
The findings from Aydin’s work were outlined in the workshop paper, Analyzing After-Sales Service Process Using Object-Centric Process Mining: A Case Study, presented at the process mining conference, ICPM 2023, in the workshop track Process Querying, Manipulation, and Intelligence (PQMI 2023) in Rome.
Read:How Borusan Cat streamlines accounts receivable and accelerates transformation with Celonis