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Contributed on March 14, 2012

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Case Study: Process Mining to Improve IT Service Management

Last year, I performed a process mining project together with our Portuguese partner Alberto Manuel from Process Sphere at his client ANA Airports in Portugal.
The Change Order process was analyzed to reduce waste and increase quality. You can read the case study published on BPTrends here.

The case study write-up focuses on the results, but what is really great about this project and process mining in general is how quick and interactively it can be performed.

Alberto and I had received and prepared the data upfront. On the client’s site we then sat down together with the CIO Manuel Chaves Magalhes and his process manager and ITIL System Administrator to analyze their process in an interactive way:

1. We showed them how their process looks like,

2. they saw things that were strange and asked questions, and

3. we drilled down into specific categories etc. to see what is going on in an interactive way.

We did this several times, and in less than one day we had generated a whole list of issues and improvement ideas.

We went through all the typical process mining situations, such as finding things that seemingly can’t be right but checking the operational system proves them to be the truth. That’s the real power of process mining: The ability to show what really happens in an objective, quick and interactive way.

So, if you are a process analyst it is really worth thinking about gaining some experience with process mining. You will be able to deliver great value to your clients in a surprisingly quick and interactive way. Your clients have more domain knowledge about their processes than you can ever have. By making their processes visible to them, you can kick-start your process improvement initiatives in a very powerful way.

Upcoming Events

Alberto Manuel and Manuel Chaves Magalhes will present their case study tomorrow at the IDC conference on Business Analytics: BI & BPM Transforming Decision Making in Lisbon (in Portuguese).

I will talk about the case study and our process mining approach in general at the BPM Day of the JAX 2012 conference on 18 April in Mainz. Bernd Rcker from Camunda is organizing this BPM Day. You can read his blog post about it here (in German).