# Analyzing Process-Aware Information System Updates Using Digital Twins of Organizations

- Type: Conference paper
- URL: https://www.gyunam.com/publication/2022-rcis/
- Date: 2022-05-01
- Authors: Gyunam Park, Marco Comuzzi, Wil M. P. van der Aalst
- Venue: Research Challenges in Information Science - 16th International Conference, RCIS 2022, Barcelona, Spain, May 17-20, 2022, Proceedings
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05760-1_10
- PDF: https://www.gyunam.com/publication/2022-rcis/paper.pdf
- Link (URL): https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05760-1_10
- Research lines: [Prescriptive process analytics and digital twins](https://www.gyunam.com/research-line/prescriptive-process-analytics/index.md)

## Abstract

Digital transformation often entails small-scale changes to information systems supporting the execution of business processes. These changes may increase the operational frictions in process execution, which decreases the process performance. The contributions in the literature providing support to the tracking and impact analysis of small-scale changes are limited in scope and functionality. In this paper, we use the recently developed Digital Twins of Organizations (DTOs) to assess the impact of (process-aware) information systems updates. More in detail, we model the updates using the configuration of DTOs and quantitatively assess different types of impacts of information system updates (structural, operational, and performance-related). We implemented a prototype of the proposed approach. Moreover, we discuss a case study involving a standard ERP procure-to-pay business process.

## Practical problem

Companies keep making small changes to the ERP and CRM systems that run their business processes, such as tightening a business rule or adding a field to an order, and digital transformation makes these updates more frequent. Because such systems are woven deeply into daily operations, it is hard to tell in advance what a change touches: which business objects and functions, which running orders or invoices, and how performance measures like waiting time and throughput will shift. Existing impact analysis approaches for ERP changes are model-driven, narrow in scope and lack working implementations, so analysts assess updates largely by hand.

## Research questions

1. How can updates of a process-aware information system be modeled as configuration changes of a digital twin of an organization?
2. How can the structural, operational and performance impacts of such updates be quantified from the digital twin?
3. Is the approach feasible as a software artifact applied to an ERP-style procure-to-pay process?

## Contributions

- A meta-model of process-aware information system (PAIS) entities, updates to business functions and business objects, and three impact types: structural, operational and performance.
- Formalizes PAIS updates as actions and action instances that change the configuration (valve and operation assignments) of a Digital Twin Interface Model (DT-IM) built on object-centric Petri nets, with a notion of effective change.
- Formal definitions of impacted object types and transitions, of the running objects affected via markings and a transition relation function, and of performance impact as the difference in diagnostics before and after an update.
- A Web-based prototype, `impacta` (GitHub gyunamister/impacta), that discovers an object-centric Petri net from OCEL data, synchronizes configuration and state via token-based replay, executes actions and reports impacts.
- A case study on a simulated procure-to-pay PAIS modeled after the standard SAP ERP process.

## Key findings

- In a simulated procure-to-pay system with 24 resources and five object types, raising the minimum order quantity valve to 10 affects one business function (create purchase order) and 51 running objects; average total service time of purchase orders falls by 4 minutes, the sojourn time of create purchase order by 9 minutes, and 13 fewer purchase orders are created.
- Changing the verify materials operation to also write a quality attribute affects one object type (material) and one function, touching 254 material objects and 153 objects of verify material; average total service time of purchase orders rises by 1.4 hours and the sojourn time of verify material by 1.6 hours.
- The prototype demonstrates the full loop of designing a DT-IM, scheduling action instances on a timeline, and computing structural and operational impacts at action start and performance impacts at action end.
- The evaluation is limited to feasibility on an artificial system; no study with business analysts was conducted.
- Limitations: only objects already in the process are counted, objects that may bypass an impacted transition are included, and performance impact is measured over all objects rather than isolated to those affected.