Pattern-based action engine: Generating process management actions using temporal patterns of process-centric problems

Abstract

As business environments become more competitive, organizations strive to improve their business processes to reduce costs and increase quality and productivity. As process improvement traditionally embraces manual creative tasks that are time-consuming and labor-intensive, the need for automating it arises. Action-Oriented Process Mining (AOPM) aims to support automated process improvement by leveraging various process mining techniques. To that end, AOPM first monitors the presence of operational constraints, i.e., operational problems, in business processes, e.g., a high waiting time for patients to register. Next, it produces interim management actions designed to address these transient problems by analyzing the monitoring results. For instance, if an excessive waiting time persists for more than a week, the system might recommend dispatching additional resources for the upcoming week. Contrary to the mature process mining support for monitoring operational constraints, the action part is typically missing in today’s process mining tools. In this work, we propose an action engine to support the automatic generation of actions. It analyzes temporal patterns of monitoring results and produces action plans that describe the execution of management actions. We have demonstrated a use case using the data of a Dutch financial institute to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed action engine and conducted experiments to evaluate its effectiveness.