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12.3 Applications 309

Fig. 12.9 Overview of the
different functional areas in a
typical organization.
Spaghetti processes are
typically encountered in
product development, service,
resource management, and
sales/CRM

as if they are geographic maps (e.g., road maps or hiking maps). Depending on the
map, insignificant roads and cities can be removed and streets and suburbs can be
amalgamated into bigger structures. Figure 12.8 shows the effect this approach on
the event log of the housing agency (i.e., the log used to construct the model in
Fig. 12.4). Section 13.1.3 will elaborate further on the cartography metaphor used
by the fuzzy mining approach.

12.3 Applications

In the previous chapter, we provided a systematic overview of the different sectors,
industries, and functional areas where process mining can be used. In this section,
we briefly revisit this overview for Spaghetti processes. Moreover, we give some
pointers to case studies describing the analysis of highly unstructured processes.

12.3.1 Process Mining Opportunities for Spaghetti Processes

Many of the use cases presented in Sect. 11.2 also apply to Spaghetti processes.
However, the “stakes are higher”; it will take more time to thoroughly analyze the
process, but the potential gains are typically also more substantial.
Figure 12.9 highlights the functional areas where typically Spaghetti processes
can be found.
Processes in Product development tend to be rather unstructured because they
are low frequent (compared to production processes) and rely on creativity and
problem-solving capabilities. For example, we have been mining event logs from
Software Configuration Management (SCM) systems such as CVS and Subversion.
In addition to managing the artifacts created by software engineers, these systems
also collect and store information on the software development process to answer
questions such as “Who created, accessed, or changed which documents?”, “When
was a particular task completed?”, etc. Process discovery efforts using the event logs
of SCM systems as input typically reveal Spaghetti-like processes as shown before.
Figure 12.9 indicates that one can also find Spaghetti processes in the functional
area Service. An interesting development is that more and more products are mon-
itored while being used in their natural habitat, e.g., modern high-end copiers, ex-
pensive medical devices, and critical production facilities collect event logs and can