This post is part of the Process Mining Use Case Series where we’ll focus on different techniques to identify process inefficiencies, non-conformant activities, and improvement opportunities. These posts will be broken into two sections – how to do the analysis and how to configure the Process Mining project.
Approvals are an important part of certain business process, but they can also disrupt the efficient execution of processes and extend task completion times.
To mitigate these issues, organizations should focus on optimizing approval processes within the platform, setting clear SLAs for approvals, automating routine decisions, and improving communication and transparency among users and approvers.
Process Mining can provide visibility into situations where the approval step of the process is causing significant delays so we know where we might want to make some adjustments to the process.
How to do the analysis
In this example the Approval step we are using is at the Requested Item level.
We’ve configured a multidimensional map using both the Requested Item table and the SC Task table so we can focus on both inefficiencies that live in the Approval step of the process as well as the task level where the fulfillment work gets done.
For the Requested Item table, we’ve added both State and Approval as Activities. Adding the Approval field as an Activity will allow us isolate situations where there is a long time between the Approval request and when it is approved.
By clicking on the Requested node on the map we can see that there were 1556 unique approvals sent for this set of requested items.
*Note: It is good practice to scope the requests or requested items you are analyzing. Maybe focus on a certain catalog or category of requested. In this case we chose to focus on Software requests.
By clicking on the Requested node, we can also get visibility into the breakdown of the outcome of those approval requests.
For example, we can see that 124 of them were rejected, 349 of them were requested but then the item oved to a close state before any approval response was sent, and about 1100 of them took on average a week to be Approved.
If we click on the arc between the Requested and the Approved step of the process, we can see that for this set of Software Requests there were 1063 that got approved. The median duration for these approvals was 1 hour but the average was 1 week so there are some opportunities.
We could use the Requested Item distribution histogram to isolate the outliers (learn more about using the histogram in this Process Mining Academy session) but in this situation since we configured Approvals as an Activity, we can also use the Transition Filter capability to look specifically for Approvals that are taking more than 5 days to go from Requested to Approved.
Click on the Transitions option in the Advanced Filters section at the bottom of the left-hand panel.
In the Transitions dialogue configure your first condition to be Approval (Requested Item) is Requested.
Click on the Add next activity button.
Then configure your second condition to be Approval (Requested Item) is Approved.
Click on the Add constraints option in the gray box between the two conditions.
Set the Has duration From value to be 5 days. Obviously, you will adjust his value for your scenario.
Click the Apply button.
We’ve now narrowed our Requested Items down to 163 in which it took longer than 5 days from approval requested to approved.
At this point we can use our Breakdowns on the left-hand side of the screen to start getting a better understanding of these 163. Some potentially useful breakdowns would be Item Display Name, Assignment Group, and Location.
We can see a good portion of these 163 requests (35 of them) are for a Tableau Desktop License and on average these requests are taking longer than 6 months – that certainly seems a little problematic.
Let’s dig into those.
Once we drilldown to those 35 using the Breakdown filtering capability we can see that on average almost 4 weeks of the fulfillment time is spent waiting for an Approval.
The rest of the time of the fulfillment time is spent at the SC Task level.
Since we decided to use a multidimensional map for this project, we have immediate access to those tasks that are tied to the requests with long running approvals and can start to dig into opportunities to improve immediately.
We’ll save analyzing SC Tasks for another Use Case series post but a good place to start would be SC Tasks that go into the “Pending” state.
How to configure the project
Depending on where the Approval step in your request process is, you may wind up configuring this differently. In our example the Approval step was at the Requested Item level so we are going to start our project with that Requested Item table. If the Approval step in your process is at the Request level you would build your project with that table.
From the upper right-hand corner of the Process Mining Workspace click on the Create New Project button.
Give your project a Name and click the Save button. I’m using “Requested Item Approval Analysis”.
In the Table Configurations related list click the New button.
Enter the name of our first table as “Requested Item”
Select Requested Item [sc_req_item] as your table.
Then enter a relevant set of filter criteria to narrow down your set of requested items. Best practice would dictate that we only focus on closed work for a specific type/category of request for a specific period.
For me that means setting these values:
- Active is false
- Closed on Last quarter
- Item -> Category is Software & Applications
Click the Save button.
Once the record is saved you’ll get access to the Activity and Breakdown Definitions related lists. Click on the New button in the Activity Definition related list.
We are going to add two Activity Definitions. The first will be Approval and the second will be State.
From the Field dropdown select the Approval field and hit Submit.
Click on the New button in the Activity Definitions related list.
Select State from the Field drop down list and hit Submit.
Select the Breakdown Definitions related list and click the New button.
The first Breakdown you’ll want is Item -> Display name. You’ll need to dot walk from the Item field to the Display name field.
Hit Submit.
The rest of the Breakdown values you configure are up to you. Typically, I see customers adding things like Location and Priority values. In the interest of time, I’m going to leave it with just Item for now.
Once you have your Breakdowns configured click on the “Go to Project Definition” related link.
Now let’s add and link the SC task table so we can dig into any bottlenecks associated to the actual fulfillment of these Requested Items.
Click on the New button in the Table Configurations related list.
Enter Tasks in the Name section of the Table Configuration record.
From the Table list choose Catalog Task [sc_task].
In the field conditions we will narrow the data down to match the Requested Item criteria.
- Active is false
- Closed on Last quarter
- Item -> Category is Software & Applications
In the Parent Table Configuration field select the Requested Item table.
Set the Relationship value to Child (you can have multiple tasks per item).
Set your Reference Field to Requested Item.
Click the Save button.
Once you’ve saved the table configuration, we get our related lists for Activity and Breakdown Definitions.
Click on the New button in the Activity Definition related list.
From the Field drop down select State.
Click the Submit button.
Select the Breakdown Definitions related list and click on the New button.
From the Field drop down list select Assignment Group
Click Submit.
At this point you can add additional Breakdown values. Helpful Breakdowns include Item -> Display Name and Short Description. *Note: If your task Short Descriptions are dynamically populated with names or numbers you will want to avoid adding this field as a Breakdown.
Once you have your Breakdowns configured click on the “Go to Project Definition” related link.
If you are in the Vancouver release or above, click on the Import Process Finding Templates related link.
Click the Generate Model (Full) button.
Once your Project finishes mining click the Open Analyst Workbench button.
At this point you will have your Multidimensional map with both the Requested Item level information (good for doing approval bottleneck analysis) and task level information (good for identifying fulfillment process bottlenecks).
If you are looking for more in-depth training you can use the Process Mining Academy library of content
You can find other Process Mining use cases here
Additional Resources
Process Mining Essentials - Now Learning Course
