Page 309 -

11.4 Applications 291

A product that has an RFID tag has a unique identifier, i.e., two identical prod-
ucts can still be distinguished. This allows for the correlation of events and thus
facilitates process mining.
• The transportation industry is also recording more and more information about
the movement of people and products. Through tracking and tracing functional-
ity the whereabouts of a particular parcel can be monitored by both sender and
receiver. Although controversial, smartcards providing access to buildings and
transportation systems can be used to monitor the movement of people. For ex-
ample, the Dutch “ov-chipkaart” can be used to travel by train, subway, and bus.
The traveler pays based on the distance between the entry point and exit point.
The recorded information can be used to analyze traveling behavior. The booking
of a flight via the Internet also generates lots of event data. In fact, the booking
process involves only electronic activities. Note that the traveler interacts with
one organization that contacts all kinds of other organizations in the background
(airlines, insurance companies, car rental agencies, etc.). All of these events are
being recorded, thus enabling process mining. The whole spectrum ranging from
Lasagna processes to Spaghetti processes can be found in this industry.
• New technologies such as cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
have created a new industry that offers computing as a utility (like water and
electricity). Google Apps. Salesforce.com, and Amazon EC2/S3 are examples of
companies providing such utilities. The idea is not new: already in 1961 John
McCarthy stated “If computers of the kind I have advocated become the comput-
ers of the future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility
just as the telephone system is a public utility. The computer utility could become
the basis of a new and important industry”. A well-known example of a SaaS
provider that is using a cloud infrastructure is Salesforce.com. This company al-
lows organizations to outsource the IT support of standard activities related to
sales and CRM without worrying about scalability and maintenance. Users pay
for using the software rather than owning it. Another example is the conference
management system EasyChair that is currently probably the most commonly
used system to host conferences and to manage the reviewing of scientific papers.
To organize a conference, there is no need to install any software as everything is
hosted and managed centrally. Organizations such as Salesforce.com and Easy-
Chair have access to valuable event data. These data can be used to improve their
software and to give advice to individual organizations. One of the challenges
SaaS providers are facing is the need to deal with variability across organiza-
tions. Process mining can help analyzing differences between organizations us-
ing cross-organizational process mining, i.e., using process mining to compare
similar processes within the same or in different organizations.
• The capital goods industry is also transforming from the situation in which cus-
tomers purchase expensive machines to the situation in which customers only
pay for the actual use of the machine. Note that this can be seen as a variant of
the SaaS paradigm. The manufacturer of the machine remains being the owner
and customers pay depending on usage and uptime of the machine. Clearly, such
pricing models require the remote monitoring of capital goods. For instance, ser-
vice provider and consumer need to agree on the actual use (e.g., hours of use