Process mining: from theory to practice

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a comparison of a number of business process mining tools currently available in the UK market. An outline of the practice of business process mining is given, along with an analysis of the main techniques developed by academia and commercial entities. This paper also acts as a primer for the acceptance and further use of process mining in industry, suggesting future directions for this practice. Design/methodology/approach – Secondary research has been completed to establish the main commercial business process mining tool vendors for the market. A literature survey has also been undertaken into the latest theoretical techniques being developed in the field of business process mining. Findings – The authors have identified a number of existing commercially available business process mining tools and have listed their capabilities within a comparative analysis table. All commercially available business process mining tools included in this paper are capable of process comparison and at least 40 per cent of the tools claim to deal with noise in process data. Originality/value – The contribution of this paper is to provide a state‐of‐the‐art review of a number of commercial business process mining tools available within the UK. This paper also presents a summary of the latest research being undertaken in academia in this subject area and future directions for the practice of business process mining.