How to Identify Rework in Your Process - Fluxiconfluxicon.com/download/Analyzing-Rework-With-Process-Mining.pdf · on another attribute, which can be asked to have the same or a different

How to Identify Rework in Your Process If you are involved with process improvement, then reducing rework is most likely one of your concerns. !There are two common causes for rework: !

1. The task was not done right the first time, so someone has to go and do it again. 2. Information that would have been necessary to process a case was missing, so it had to be sent back. !

Rework is bad because it adds to the workload (and costs) of the company, because it delays the process completion time for the customer, and because—due to the extra effort—it often impacts the completion times for successive cases as well.

!In the above picture you can see the effect of rework at an IT Help Desk process: Broken hardware incidents that should be simply handed off to the supplier to fulfill their warranty contracts came back to the IT help desk. The reason was that not enough information was provided to the supplier to identify the broken hardware. !Process mining can help you to identify and pinpoint rework patterns in your process. You will be able to see where rework occurs, how often, and which process categories are affected by it. !Fluxicon Bomanshof 259, 5611 NS Eindhoven T +31-(0)62-436-4201 [email protected] www.fluxicon.com "1

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Of course, once you have found where and how often rework occurs, you will still have to go outside of your process mining tool and talk to the people in your process to find out why this is happening. But you will be armed with objective information and visual evidence that will be enormously useful to engage and focus the discussion. !For example, in the case of the IT Help Desk above the people working in the process were not aware that warranty cases came back so often. Each of the employees handled a few such cases, but what seems to be a small extra step here and there amounts to a lot of waste if one sees the complete picture—sometimes this effect is called “hidden factory” [1]. With process mining you will be able to provide an objective overview about the complete process. At the IT Help Desk, the business analyst and the process stakeholders analyzed the process in an interactive workshop session using process mining. As a solution, the placement of barcode stickers on the hardware components helped improve the management of incidents by reducing the rework rate significantly. !In another example, the improvement of a form at a website of a consumer electronics manufacturer reduced the amount of missing information in a refund service process, both reducing the amount of work at the service provider (who had to retrieve the missing information) and reducing the process completion times for this critical consumer-facing process. !The solution does not always need to be technical either. For example, in a call center the increase of repeat calls indicated a quality problem: The people who had called earlier needed to call again because their problem was not solved in the first call. The agents had been instructed to keep the call times as short as possible, which seemed to save money on first sight. However, in the long run it did more harm than good, because the customers were less happy and kept calling back. Shifting the measurement focus to ‘first time right’ greatly enhanced both the customer experience and the efficiency at the call center. !With process mining, you will have the process with all its problems right there, magically and objectively, at your fingertips, which is exactly what makes it possible for your team to focus on the why (and not the what) in the process analysis. This is the big benefit of process mining. !In this article, you will learn five tips for how to analyze rework in the process mining software Disco (download the free demo version from the Disco website to follow along with the instructions). !Let’s get started! Your friends from Fluxicon,

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1) Filter direct loops with the ‘Filter this path…’ shortcut Rework manifests itself in different kinds of loop patterns in your process. Often, you will directly see the loop in your process map.

For example, take a look at this call center example (one of the demo data sets you can download from the Disco website). The process map shows cases that are started by inbound calls, and you can see from the self-loop at the Inbound Call activity that there are repeat calls for some cases.

!To focus on these repeat calls, you can click on the loop arrow and press the 'Filter this path...' button in the overview badge (see picture on the next page).

!!!!Fluxicon Bomanshof 259, 5611 NS Eindhoven T +31-(0)62-436-4201 [email protected] www.fluxicon.com "3

http://fluxicon.com/disco/files/Disco-Demo-Logs.zip




You will be taken to a pre-configured Follower filter for this path and can simply press the 'Apply filter' button in the lower right corner.




As a result, you can see the new process map for the repeat calls and you can see that 16% of all cases show this repeat call pattern.

!!!




2) Catch global repetitions with the ‘Eventually follows’ option Now, this gives us the direct repetitions for the Inbound Call activity. But wat about repeat calls that come in after some other activity happened in the process?

This one is easy: You can go back to your Follower filter (simply click on the filter symbol in the lower left corner) and change the mode from 'directly followed' to 'eventually followed'. Your filter result will now include all cases that at any point in the process had a repetition (or more) of activity Inbound Call.

!!




3) Filter for repetitions without knowing where they are But what do you do if you don't really know which loops you should be focusing on? Say, you want to filter all cases that have some rework in it, regardless of which activity was involved in the rework.

You can use the Follower filter to do that, too. Take a look at the Sandbox example that comes with Disco to see how:

First, click on the filter symbol in the lower left corner to add a filter.

!Then, add a Follower filter from the list of filters (see next page).

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In the Follower filter settings (see next page), then select all activities as reference and follower values (this will have have no effect because the filter matches every combination that is available).

And now comes the trick: Below the reference and follower event list you can also filter for additional constraints on another attribute, which can be asked to have the same or a different value. Often, this is used to filter out violations of segregation of duties or other compliance constraints, but here we are using the 'the same value' option to filter repetitions of any kind.

Enable the checkbox Require and configure the settings so that it says the same value of Activity as shown below. Then click 'Apply filter'.

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The result of this filter are all cases that have some repetition somewhere in the process, no matter which activity has been repeated. We can see that in total 41% of the cases exhibit repetitions in this process.




4) Visualize repetition hotspots with the ‘Max repetitions’ option To see where the biggest rework occurs, you can switch the process map view to 'Max repetitions' as shown below. The numbers in your process map will change to show the maximum number of times an activity was performed for a single case.

In the purchasing example, the activity Amend Request for Quotation Requester really stands out as it has been repeated up to 12 times in the same case.

!




5) View detailed repetition statistics by focusing on a single activity We now know that activity Amend Request for Quotation Requester has been performed up to 12 times for the same case, but how many cases exactly repeated this activity so often? Just one? How many repetitions are most typical?

If you want to focus in on one specific repeating activity in more detail, you can do the following:

First, click on the activity you want to focus on and press the 'Filter this activity...' button in the overview badge.

!!Then, in the Attribute filter (see next page) change the mode from 'Mandatory' to 'Keep selected' (we only want to keep this one activity right now).

!!Fluxicon Bomanshof 259, 5611 NS Eindhoven T +31-(0)62-436-4201 [email protected] www.fluxicon.com "11



After applying the filter, change from the Map view to the Statistics view and …




! ... finally change to the 'Events per case' statistics to see how many times this particular activity was performed for how many cases.

For example, now we can see that there was indeed just one case that performed activity Amend Request for Quotation Requester 12 times, and that there were three cases, where this activity was performed 6 times (see screenshot below).

As always, you can now further analyze the context of your process pattern by looking at further statistics (for example, to see which process categories are most affected) and by inspecting individual cases in the Cases view (for example, to look at the comments field and to talk to the people who were involved involved in these cases to learn what the reason was and how they would improve it).!Which rework patterns can you find in your own process? If you need help, please get in touch and we will help you to get started!




References !1. J.G. Miller and T.E. Vollmann. The Hidden Factory. Harvard Business Review, 1985.




http://hbr.org/1985/09/the-hidden-factory/ar/1

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How to Identify Rework in Your Process - Fluxiconfluxicon.com/download/Analyzing-Rework-With-Process-Mining.pdf · on another attribute, which can be asked to have the same or a different