## 5 Result and Discussion
### Educational Scenario  
Educational institutions such as universities are spread across cities in a country with the purpose of granting academic degrees in various subjects. When the owner of a network of universities decides to standardize the higher educational ERP system to be used for all the universities belonging to the network, the first step is to know how suitable the software is for each university. The ERP system provides support for different processes, and it can be configured to suit how each process is executed in the university where it will be installed. The diversity of process variants the ERP supports can be represented through a configurable process model. The decisions that are made to adapt the software to the way the process is executed in each university corresponds to the configuration that allows one to generate a derived process model specific for each university. The derived process model will probably not be exactly the same as the process model that represents how the process is currently executed, but it will be the closest process variant the software is able to support. If a university is currently running the process using other software, we can assume that an event log is currently recording how each process is being executed. The framework proposed in this article takes as input the configurable process model that represents the different parameterizations provided by the ERP system for the process and the event log that represents the current execution of the process in a university. Based on them, the framework generates a derived process model that represents how the process could be run in the future using the ERP system. Beyond their organizational structure, universities share some common processes, such as planning academic courses. The planning of academic courses in a university is a complex process due to several factors such as government regulations, internal policies, dynamic changes of knowledge in certain domains, economic and human resources, among others. In this process, both administrative personnel and faculty members, sometimes from different departments, are involved in each stage of the process. This process, in general, considers some similar stages across universities such as course planning, student assistant planning, thesis planning, among others. To deal with its complexity, it can be modeled at a high level. Figure 10 depicts a general process model that includes sub-processes that group common activities in the academic planning process. We have used this process model as a reference process model for three different universities located across a country. For the sake of simplicity, we call them: Northern University, Central University and Southern University, according to their location in the country. Each university executes a different process variant of the reference model according to its policies, regulations, socio-demographic characteristics and geographic needs. For example, the Northern University is a low-income university, so there are some courses that do not have student assistants, whereas in the other two high-income universities, there is more than one student assistant in some courses. The Southern University does not have a proper internal information system, so selecting student assistants is a manual task. The configurable process tree contains 70 activities, grouped in the eight sub-processes shown in Figure 10 and nine configurable nodes that have mixed dependencies. The configurable process model is considerably large, making it impractical to show it completely. To illustrate how the configuration is performed, Figure 11 shows a scheme of the configuration process. The upper boxes represent configurable process trees for three different sub-processes of the process reference model. The lower process trees, inside the dashed line boxes, are derived process trees where the corresponding configurable nodes have been configured as hide. Figure 10: General model of the academic planning process of a university.