Improvement opportunities are super powerful and a huge time saver. It's easier than ever now to create these so that you have the same insights surfaced to you automatically each time!
Is there a specific pattern in your data you don't want to see, are things taking longer than 24 hours to move out of a specific state when you've already defined it should be no more than two? It really only takes a few clicks and all of a sudden you have some standardized parameters that you can use for your analysis every time - you can even track how you improved over subsequent mines 🤔
In today's post and video I walk you through how to use our guided setup for creating different types of improvement opportunities. I'll focus on a couple of use cases here that can be expanded on to build whatever rules you want!
Here is a quick video on how to achieve this with many examples or follow along below:
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 Mining configuration beyond the out of the box content packs offered with a given workflow
Today we'll be working from "Process Configurations":
Choose the table you want to create the improvement opp for:
And scroll down to the bottom of the record, this is where we can find all the existing automation opps:
As you can see we have two types of improvement opps - automated and what we'll call "rule-based" definitions.
The difference between these two are simple
- Automated: Finds simple patterns such has repetitions, extreme durations, or extra steps in your process
- These can be specified further such as number of repetitions, how long a duration is considered 'extreme', etc.
- Rule Based: Specific patterns or trends you want to identify that is relevant to YOUR business unit
- i.e. An incident that is moving directly to On Hold from the New state (bypassing assignment, work in progress, etc.), moving into Awaiting Caller info more than 3 times, or incidents that are taking longer than 2 days to be assigned
For today we will be creating both - an automated finding AND a rule based finding. I also want these findings to be surfaced to me EACH TIME I mine the incident table as they will always be relevant.
Automated: I would like to identify whenever state 'Ping-Ponging' is happening - this will be whenever an incident bounces between the same two states 3 times or more
Rule Based: I want to identify all incidents that stayed in the "On Hold" state way too long (more than 12 hours without being addressed)
For my automated finding I will click the "Use Finding Builder" shown in the screenshot above, this will navigate me to the guided setup UI:
The 'ping pong' template best fits what I need here however there are examples for every single template here that will help you find exactly what you need
We just had a few things to do here
- Give it a name
- Specify the FIELD where we are tracking this ping pong (in our case State but another great example is ping-ponging between the same 2 groups)
- Assign the category
- This step doesn't impact any of the functionality, just provides categorizations for tracking
- The final step is defining it a bit further - in this example I defined ping-pong as moving between the same two states 3 times but this could be increased or decreased
Your finding definition is done!
I go into a bit more detail on how to create the rule based definitions in the video (they're also quite easy but are a bit more involved so theres some explanation and context provided there)
But once you have created it you are free to add it to your project next time you mine!
And finally you can do the same to add the rule-based definition we created:
Now that these are applied to your project EVERY time you re-mine, these insights will be there. You will never need to recreate or re-add them. This is a really nice way to track your progress over time, see how these improvement opportunities are changing quarter over quarter.
This was just one example of how you can use our finding builder to really help you tell the actual story of whats going on. Good luck!
Thanks for reading and as always,
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
BelalA
