Data Quality Problems in Process Mining and What To Do About Them — Part 8: Different Clocks
This is the eighth article in our series on data quality problems for process mining. You can find an overview of all articles in the series here.
In previous articles we have seen how wrong timestamps can mess up everything in process mining: The process flows, the variants, and time measurements like case durations and waiting times in the process map.
One particularly tricky reason for timestamp errors is that the timestamps in your data set may have been recorded by multiple computers that run on different clocks. For example, in this case study at a security services company operators logged their actions when they arrived on-site, identified the problem, etc. on their hand-held devices. These mobile devices sometimes had different local times from the server as well as from each other.
If you look at the scenario below you can see why that is a problem: Let’s say a new incident is reported at the headquarters at 1:30 PM. Five minutes later, a mobile operator responds to the request and indicates that they will go to the location to fix it. However, because the clock on their mobile device is running 10 minutes late, the recorded timestamp indicates 1:25 PM.
When you then combine all the different timestamps in your data set to perform a process mining analysis, you will actually see the response of the operator show up before the initial incident report. Not only does this create incorrect flows in your process map…
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