Business Process Discovery - Application / Techniques

Application / Techniques

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

• Process discovery is one of the three main types of process mining. The other two types of process mining are conformance checking and model extension/enhancement. All of these techniques aim at extracting process related knowledge from event logs. In the case of process discovery, there is no prior process model; the model is discovered based on event logs. Conformance checking aims at finding differences between a given process model and event log. This way it is possible to quantify compliance and analyze discrepancies. Enhancement takes an a priori model and improves or extends it using information from the event log, e.g., show bottlenecks.
• Business process discovery is the next level of understanding in the emerging field of business analytics, which allows organizations to view, analyze and adjust the underlying structure and processes that go into day-to-day operations. This discovery includes information gathering of all of the components of a business process, including technology, people, department procedures and protocols.
• Business process discovery creates a process master which complements business process analysis (BPA). BPA tools and methodologies are well suited to top-down hierarchical process decomposition, and analysis of to-be processes. BPD provides a bottoms-up analysis that marries to the top-down to provide a complete business process, organized hierarchically by BPA.
• Business Intelligence provides organizations with reporting and analytics on the data in their organizations. However, BI has no process model, awareness or analytics. BPD complements BI by providing an explicit process view to current operations, and providing analytics on that process model to help organizations identify and act upon business process inefficiencies, or anomalies.
• Web analytics are a limited example of BPD in that web analytics reconstruct the web-user’s process as they interact with a Web-site. However, these analytics are limited to the process as is contained within the session, from the users perspective and with respect to just the web-based system and process.
• Business triage provides a framework for categorizing the processes identified by business process analysis (BPA) based on their relative importance to achieving a stated, measurable goal or outcome. Utilizing the same categories employed by military medical and disaster medical services, business processes are categorized as:
  • Essential/critical (red process) - Process essential for achieving outcomes/goals
  • Important/urgent (yellow process) - Process which speeds achieving outcomes/goals
  • Optional/supportive (green process) - Process not needed to achieve outcomes/goals

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.