Business process discovery

Business process discovery (BPD) related to process mining is a set of techniques that automatically construct a representation of an organization’s current business processes and its major process variations. These techniques use evidence found in the existing technology systems that run business processes within an organization.

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Business process discovery techniques

Business process discovery techniques embody the following properties:

Application / techniques

Business Process Discovery complements and builds upon the work in many other fields.

Resources are allocated based on the process category with resources first dedicated to red processes, then yellow processes and finally green processes. In the event that resources become limited, resources are first withheld from Green Processes, then Yellow Processes. Resources are only withheld from Red Processes if failure to achieve outcomes/goals is acceptable.

The purpose / example

A small example may illustrate the Business Process Discovery technology that is required today. Automated Business Process Discovery tools capture the required data, and transform it into a structured dataset for the actual diagnosis; A major challenge is the grouping of repetitive actions from the users into meaningful events. Next, these Business process discovery tools propose probabilistic process models. Probabilistic behavior is essential for the analysis and the diagnosis of the processes. The following shows an example where a probabilistic repair-process is recovered from user actions. The “as-is” process model shows exactly where the pain is in this business. Five percent faulty repairs is a bad sign, but worse, the repetitive fixes that are needed to complete those repairs are cumbersome.

A deeper analysis of the “as-is” process data may reveal which are the faulty parts that are responsible for the overall behavior in this example. It may lead to the discovery of subgroups of repairs that actually need management focus for improvement.

In this case, it would become obvious that the faulty parts are also responsible for the repetitive fixes. Similar applications have been documented, such as a Healthcare Insurance Provider case where in 4 months the ROI of Business Process Analysis was earned from precisely comprehending its claims handling process and discovering the faulty parts.

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