Spaghetti or lasagne – conquer the process monster

The processes are essential building blocks of the everyday enterprise activities. Due to their repetitive execution any improvement in the process design has a multiple effect on the usage of resources. Despite that processes are commonly strongly regulated and monitored by experts, the actual flows may follow varied ways, sometimes quite different from the rules. The process mining toolset attempts to discover and describe the real process paths from event logs. Although this may seem simple, naive approaches quickly lead to unacceptable results and serious methods are needed. Major results can be the typical flows themselves, identified discrepancies between policies and reality, and a correct measurement of the sojourn times, providing the basis for a data based optimization of the processes. There are more and more tools supporting this activity, some new developed in R.

Molnár Tamás
Data scientist