=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3098/dc_203
|storemode=property
|title=Why Am I Waiting? Analyzing Waiting Times in Business Processes from Event Logs (Extended Abstract)
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3098/dc_203.pdf
|volume=Vol-3098
|authors=Muhammad Awais Ali
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icpm/Ali21
}}
==Why Am I Waiting? Analyzing Waiting Times in Business Processes from Event Logs (Extended Abstract)==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3098/dc_203.pdf
Why Am I Waiting? Analyzing Waiting Times in
Business Processes from Event Logs
(Extended Abstract)
Muhammad Awais Ali
University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
muhammad.awais.ali@ut.ee
Abstract—Business analysts are in a continuous effort to the unimportant tasks suffer the most and hence, their
improve the cycle time of a process by identifying waiting waiting time increases [11].
time bottlenecks and adapting strategies to improve the business
processes by reducing delays. However, there are several sources
In this setting, the problem addressed in this thesis is two-
of waiting times. Therefore, it is a challenge for a business fold. First, the thesis addresses the challenge of identifying
analyst to categorize and quantify the sources of waiting time and the internal sources of waiting time from an event log of
discover changes that may reduce or eliminate these delays. We a business process, and quantifying the share of waiting
will empirically address this research problem by first identifying time attributable to each of these internal sources. Second,
the sources of waiting time from the process execution logs and
quantifying the share of waiting time attributable to each of the
it addresses the problem of recommending interventions to
sources. Secondly, we will identify the interventions to reduce or reduce the waiting time. Accordingly, the research questions
eliminate the waiting time in business processes. Our proposed of this study are:
approach will be evaluated in two phases. In the first phase, it 1) What are the possible sources of waiting time in a
will be evaluated using BPI challenges, and in the second phase, business process (e.g. batching, prioritization, etc.)?
we will conduct a case study with industrial partners to further
validate our approach. 2) How to automatically detect the sources of waiting time
Index Terms—Waiting Time, Process Mining, Event Logs. from an event log?
3) How to recommend interventions in view of minimizing
I. I NTRODUCTION AND P ROBLEM D EFINITION the amount of waiting time?
Reducing delays in business processes is a recurrent prob- A solution should fulfil the following requirements:
lem in the field of business process management. To ad- R1: The recommended interventions should be accurate.
dress this problem, analysts need to discover and quantify Accuracy can be measured in terms of the error between the
the sources of waiting time in a process and then design predicted and the actual outcome after the intervention.
interventions to mitigate them. The sources of waiting time R2: The proposed approach should recommend interven-
are manifold [1], [2]. Some sources of waiting are external tions in an acceptable computation time.
to the process (e.g. waiting for a response from a customer, The outcome of this research will be a set of techniques
waiting for a delivery from a supplier) [3]. Others are due to that take event log of a business process as an input, produces
factors internal to the process, including but not limited to: a diagnostic of the causes of waiting time and recommends
1) Resource Contention: Resource contention occurs actions to reduce or eliminate the waiting time in a business
when there is more work to be done than the resources process as illustrated in Figure 1.
available to accomplish it [4].
2) Batch Processing: In batch processing [5]–[8], re-
sources bundle several cases together so that they can
be processed as a group. This will infuse waiting time
since the resource will wait for a batch to be available
for processing. Hence, this introduces waiting time due
to batch creation.
3) Resource Unavailability: A particular resource in a
business process that does not operate on weekends will
eventually introduce the waiting time in a process due
to resource unavailability [9], [10].
4) Work Prioritization: There may be some tasks in a Fig. 1. Illustrative Example
process that the resource may prioritize to improve
the throughput of the process. However, the benefit II. M ETHODOLOGY
decreases with an increase in prioritization, such as
The proposed research will adopt Design Science Research
Work funded by the European Research Council (PIX Project). (DSR) [12] for identifying the sources for the delay in a
Copyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0
International (CC BY 4.0).
business process. We will follow an iterative approach con- combination of possible interventions to reduce the waiting
sisting of design, prototyping, and evaluation. We will start time in the process, taking into consideration constraints on
by conducting a systematic literature review of sources of other performance measures, such as cost. The impact of
delays and waiting waste in business processes, drawing for these interventions will be evaluated by means of data-driven
example into the literature on Lean management [1], [13]. simulation techniques [14], [15].
Based on this review, we will develop a taxonomy of sources
of waiting time in business processes. This analysis will inform
the development of a framework for identifying sources of
waiting waste in a process based on execution data. We will
then develop techniques to quantify the share of waiting time
attributable to each of the sources identified in the taxonomy
and to recommend interventions to reduce or eliminate the
waiting time. The proposed framework evaluation will be in
two phases. In the first phase, we will evaluate our approach
using synthetic event logs as well as real-life event logs, such
as those released by the BPI challenge series.1 In this setting,
we will compare the findings of our proposed techniques
with those of the participants in these challenges. Based on
Fig. 2. Overall Research Design
the insights gained from this first evaluation phase, we will
improve our proposed approach. We will then conduct a case
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