Yes, you should define your process mining analysis questions early in the project (even before you start extracting your data). And there are many different questions that can be answered by process mining.
However, in last week’s Process Mining Café, we did not focus on answering these analysis questions. Not yet. Because before you can go into the Targeted Analysis (Step No. 10 in the process mining project methodology below), you need to discover the process. You need to understand how the data relates to the process that you know. And you need to explore where you can best break up the data set in the right way to get ready for your analysis. This step is called Explorative Analysis (Step No. 9 in the process mining project methodology below).
The Explorative Analysis step differs for every process and data set. But there are some common steps that you can take. As a guideline, we give you seven questions that you can ask yourself:
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You start by looking around: Does the process resemble your expectations?
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Where does the process start and end?
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Do you have one or more processes?
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Is there a little or a lot of variation?
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Are the activities on the right level?
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Do the cases have the right scope?
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Have you created the right baseline?
To give you an experience of what exactly such an Explorative Analysis looks like, Rudi and Anne take on the loan application process of the BPIC 2016 dataset. You can even join our exploration by downloading the data set and following along with us!
Watch the recording here if you weren’t at the live broadcast or want to re-watch the café. Contact us anytime at cafe@fluxicon.com if you have questions or suggestions about the café!
Have you seen that the Process Mining Café is also available as a podcast? So, if you prefer to listen to our episodes in your favorite podcast player, you can get them all here.
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Anne Rozinat
Market, customers, and everything else
Anne knows how to mine a process like no other. She has conducted a large number of process mining projects with companies such as Philips Healthcare, Océ, ASML, Philips Consumer Lifestyle, and many others.
info@fluxicon.com