Are We Doing Things Right? An Approach to Measure Process Inefficiencies in the Control Flow

A major dimension for assessing organizational performance is efficiency, i.e., the amount of output obtained from a given input. Organizational efficiency is closely connected to business process efficiency. Inefficiently executed processes may consume a lot of resources and still not achieve their internal goals. Because you cannot improve what you cannot measure, process mining tools try to quantify process inefficiency with rather basic indicators, which provide only limited information. This paper introduces an approach that measures process inefficiencies in the control flow, taking factors like an activity's intended position in the trace and the allowed number of repetitions into account. Our evaluation results show that the process performance indicators that our approach defines capture aspects of process inefficiency that have not been taken into account in the baseline indicator that is currently provided in process mining tools.

Automated summary

Efficiency is a key dimension for evaluating organizational performance, and process inefficiencies can lead to resource waste and failure to achieve internal goals. This paper introduces a new method for measuring process inefficiencies, showing that it captures aspects not considered by other methods.