Gijs Jansen works as a business intelligence specialist at Essent, a large energy supplier in the Netherlands. One day he was asked to calculate the “snake plot” and “ping-pong factor” for the process of becoming and being a customer. He had no clue how to approach this, but he was eager to solve this problem.

The business intelligence department is responsible to report Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for these processes. However, reporting a “snake plot” was something different compared to the existing reports they delivered. It required a deeper insight into how the customer passed though the different departments and the number of times each department touched each request.

A colleague suggested that he could try process mining. Gijs first started a small process mining project to analyse the credit insurance process. It was a simple process that was expected to be automated for most cases. However, the process mining results showed the contrary: Gijs found that disputes on contracts required a manual intervention for many cases.

This experience gave him the confidence to attack the “snake plot” and “ping-pong factor” problem. It took some effort but Gijs was able to extract the data for the customer process and transform it into the right process mining format. He then analyzed the process maps and saw how each customer request was handled, which departments were involved, and how often each request was touched by which employee. This resulted into a new set of KPIs that were discussed monthly to reduce the lead time and to limit the number of touches.