EMailAnalyzer : an e-mail mining plug-in for the ProM framework

Abstract

Increasingly information systems log historic information in a systematic way. Work°ow management systems, but also ERP, CRM, SCM, and B2B systems often provide a so-called \event log, i.e., a log recording the execution of activities. Thus far, process mining has been focusing on such structured event logs resulting in powerful analysis tech- niques and tools for discovering process, control, data, organizational, and social structures from event logs. Unfortunately, many work pro- cesses are not supported by systems providing structured logs. Instead very basic tools such as a text editors, spreadsheets, and e-mail are used. This report explores the application of process mining to e-mail, i.e., un- structured or semi-structured e-mail messages are converted in event logs suitable for the application of process mining tools. This report presents the tool EMailAnalyzer which analyzes and transforms e-mail messages in MS Outlook to a format that can be used by our process mining tools. The main innovative aspect of this work is that our analysis is not re- stricted to the social network, the main goal is to discover interaction patterns and processes.