Material Movement Analysis for Warehouse Business Process Improvement with Process Mining: A Case Study

Process mining is a technique to model and analyze business process based on traces of activities performed and stored in the database of any information systems being operated by the company i.e. event logs. This paper aims to add literature on the implementation of process mining in warehouse management process. First, extraction of all related activities from LTAK and LTAP tables of SAP Warehouse Management module is conducted. The event log are processed with Heuristic Miner Algorithm in PROM. The output of the mining is the actual business process model. The analysis of the output discover deviation from the standard procedure set by the company with the presence of additional activities and nonstandard flow of materials. The bottleneck analysis shows that the material spent a long time in the high rack and transferred between high racks. The average lead time from material receipt until issued is slightly higher than the target set the company. Further analysis of the issues revealed root-cause of the problems which are insufficient warehouse related capacity such as forklift, racks and staffs to serve incoming materials. Finally, recommendations are provided to deal with the warehouse management issues facing the case companies.