How to Identify Rework in Your Process
[This article previously appeared in the Process Mining News — Sign up now to receive regular articles about the practical application of process mining.]
If you are involved with process improvement, then reducing rework is most likely one of your concerns.
Two common causes for rework are:
The task was not done right the first time, so someone has to go and do it again. Information that would have been necessary to work on a case was missing, so it had to be sent back.
Rework is bad because it adds to the workload (and costs) of the company, because it delays the process completion time for the customer, and because — due to the extra effort — it often impacts the completion times for the following cases as well.
Process mining can help you to identify and pinpoint rework patterns in your process. By letting the process mining tool map out your actual process based on the IT data, you will be able to see where rework occurs, how often, and which process categories are affected by it.
Of course, once you have found where and how often rework occurs, you will still have to go and talk to the people in your process to find out why this is happening. But you will be armed with objective information and visual evidence that will be enormously useful to engage the people who are responsible for the process, and to focus the discussion on facts rather than keep arguing…
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