This post is part of the Process Optimization 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 Optimization project.
One of the many things that makes process mining different than your more traditional reporting and analytics is the ability to use the steps/transitions within the lifecycle of a piece of work to identify opportunities.
For example, one interesting way to look for self service opportunities, or potential routing or staffing issues would be to focus on pieces of work that take a long time to get to the In Progress state, but then take a relatively short time to get to the resolved or closed state.
As of the Utah release we can quickly isolate these opportunities using the Transition Filter capabilities on the Analyst Workbench.
You can find other Use Case recordings here
How to do the analysis
This approach can be applied to any workflow (Incident, HR Case, Customer Service Case, etc.) and does not require any additional/special Process Optimization configuration beyond the out of the box content packs offered with a given workflow
Open your project to the Analyst Workbench view.
Click on the Transitions option in the Advanced filters section in the lower left of the Analyst Workbench.
The Advanced filters experienced was enhanced in the Utah release to allow us to add additional constraints.
We are going to create 2 conditions. The first will isolate the incidents that took longer than 2 days to go from the New state to In Progress. Then we’ll create second condition to further refine those incidents to just the ones that after taking 2 days to get to In Progress took less then 30 minutes to resolve.
In the first condition box set State is New
Click the Add next activity button.
Adjust the “Followed by” value to be “Eventually followed by”. This is an important distinction. It allows us to differentiate between the State of New being immediately followed by the State of In Progress and the State of New eventually being followed by the State of In Progress (with maybe some other States or activities in between).
In the second purple box set the condition to be State is In Progress. For the purposes of this example, we are using the In Progress state. If you are using the Assigned state maybe you use that. Perhaps you want to set up a model that has both an activity of State and Assigned To. In that scenario you may want to set the second condition to Assigned To is not empty. There will be many ways to approach this use case, we just want to highlight one way to use transition filters to accomplish it.
So now we have this Transition filter set up to look for all incidents that go into the state of New and eventually end up in the state of In Progress. We also want to add the constraint of it taking longer than 2 days to get there.
Click on the Add constraints option underneath the “Eventually followed By” setting.
Set the Has duration From value to 2 days. Meaning that we only want incidents that greater than 2 days to get from the New state to the In Progress state.
Now let’s add the additional condition of taking less than an hour to go from In Progress to Resolved.
Click on Add next activity.
Set the “Followed By” value to “Eventually followed By”
Set the condition to State is Resolved.
Set the Occurrence is value to Last. This will ensure that we are focused on the final time the incident moves to the Resolved state. (Eliminate situations where an incident was resolved quickly and then reopened)
The last thing we need to do is set the time constraint of less than an hour for this step. Click on Add constraints under the “Eventually followed By” condition.
Set the Has duration Up to: value to 30 minutes. This means to only capture incidents where there was less than 30 minutes between when it was set to the In Progress state and when it eventually got set to Resolved.
Click on the Apply all chains button in the lower right-hand corner.
If this is the first time you are running this combination you will be notified that a Task is running in the background.
You can use the Scheduled tasks panel on the right-hand side of the screen to view the result of the mining.
Once you have the filtered map you can click on the In Progress to Resolve node to validate that we have only incidents that took less then 30 minutes to move through this transition. You can see the average time in my example is 9 minutes and that the histogram maxes out with a bucket between 27-30 minutes.
If you look at all of the paths to get to the In Progress state, they will all be above 2 days.
Once we have this subset of incidents, we can now start using our Breakdown filters and other Analyst Workbench capabilities to dig deeper into where the opportunities might lie.
The purpose of this post was to give you an understanding of one way to approach doing some analysis of work that is taking a long time to get started but once it’s started the actual work is completed very quickly. Could there be routing optimization opportunities, self-service opportunities, staffing adjustments, etc.
As with all analysis there will be multiple ways to look at and interpret the results.
How to configure the Process Optimization Project
This analysis should not require any special configuration. The out of the box project for each of the workflows will enable you to do this type of analysis.
One potential option would be to add the Assigned To field as an Activity. Then track from when State is New to when Assign To is not empty. Then from When Assigned To is not empty to Resolved.
If you choose to take this approach you might want to isolate your initial project to a specific group to control the number of Assign To values on the map.
If you are looking for more in-depth training you can use the Process Optimization Academy library of content
You can find other Process Optimization use cases here
Additional Resources
Process Optimization Essentials - Now Learning Course
