Interactive Process Identification and Selection from SAP ERP

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Interactive SAP Explorer tool, which encodes SAP ERP data as a labeled property graph to facilitate process identification, selection, and complex querying for process mining.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel graph-based approach for extracting and querying process-related data from SAP ERP systems, aiding process mining tasks.

Findings

Enables complex process-related queries in SAP ERP

Facilitates extraction of event logs for process mining

Uses labeled property graphs to represent relational data

Abstract

SAP ERP is one of the most popular information systems supporting various organizational processes, e.g., O2C and P2P. However, the amount of processes and data contained in SAP ERP is enormous. Thus, the identification of the processes that are contained in a specific SAP instance, and the creation of a list of related tables is a significant challenge. Eventually, one needs to extract an event log for process mining purposes from SAP ERP. This demo paper shows the tool Interactive SAP Explorer that tackles the process identification and selection problem by encoding the relational structure of SAP ERP in a labeled property graph. Our approach allows asking complex process-related queries along with advanced representations of the relational structure.