MA Abschlussvortrag, Thomas Eckert, Ort: Online, Datum: 27.04.2022, Zeit: 15:00 Uhr

Internal audit continuously aims to provide objective assurance to add business value, mitigate risks and to improve a company’s operations and processes. To fulfill this target in the best possible way it is required to always incorporate latest developments and methods to deal with the increasing amount of data and business process complexity. One of these methods is process mining.
The objective of this thesis is to investigate if and how process mining can be used to enhance the overall assurance as well as the quality of the evidence provided by an internal audit. The evaluation is performed based on the Service Excellence Audit conducted in North America by Siemens Healthineers. Thereby, the incident management process is analyzed with process mining. First, the real process flow is revealed by process discovery. Thereafter, several ad-vanced process mining techniques like conformance checking, detection of process inefficien-cies and mining of additional perspectives are applied.
As expected, the use of process mining delivered several advantages in various aspects of an internal audit. Thus, with process mining a wholistic overview can be gathered which can also be used for further planning activities. Furthermore, the number and level of detail of the as-sessed risks can be increased significantly, whereby the impact of findings can easily be de-termined. Additionally, process mining can also increase the acceptance of the audit’s conclu-sions and the resulting measures, especially if the process mining outcomes are shared with the auditee.