Root Cause Analysis in Process Mining

Process Mining Tip of the Week #46

Identifying the root cause of friction points is the most common request we get in process mining projects. One of the easy tools we've used in the past is to create an abstraction of the process just for the friction point. 

Outline the issue: We have too many holds placed on our orders and want to understand why the holds are being placed.

A simple analysis without process mining would be able to get you what order sources spawn the most holds, which regions, etc. However, that analysis won't give you the actions taken on the order before and after.

How do I Identify the root cause of friction points?

The key to getting the value out of process mining is to identify the unique "activities" (read: timestamps) in the business process that can represent the manual work taken to cause or resolve friction points. 

Once these timestamps are fed into a process mining tool, then the root cause analysis becomes much more complex:

• Which actions are taken after common holds?

• Which holds cause the most actions to be taken by our reps?

• Which holds take the longest to resolve?

• What actions on orders cause holds? (like changing the shipping address)

This analysis from process mining is much more complex and gives you the fourth dimension of time baked in.

Hope this example from ProcessMiningIQ is helpful in your analysis journey!

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