Focusing business process lead time improvements using influence analysis

Abstract

Shortening lead times in a business process is important for meetings service level agreements, decreasing inventories and working capital, keeping customers satisfied and in short: staying in business. Process mining methods make it possible to generate a large amount of transaction event data and case attributes that are useful for analysing lead times. However, finding root causes for long lead times is not so straightforward with current process mining methods. In this paper we extend our prevously presented influence analysis methodology by providing alternative treatment for continuous target variables like lead times and making it possible to give weights for each process case. We extend our contribution measure by presenting the definitions for binary/continuous as well as weighted/non-weighted needs. Using a publicly available real-life case study from Rabobank’s service desk process we demonstrate the effect of using either continuous or binary approach combined with possible weighting.