Blog Posts

Process Mining at The Dutch Railways — Process Mining Camp 2017

Are you getting ready for this years Process Mining Camp? If you havent registered yet, make sure to secure your ticket for 19 and 20 June now!

To get us all into the proper camp spirit, we will be releasing the videos from last years camp over the coming weeks. The first speakers at Process Mining Camp 2017 were Remco Bunder and Jacco Vogelsang, two pioneering information analysts at Nederlandse Spoorwegen (Dutch Railways). Remco and Jacco had joined camp in 2016 and got inspired by the talk of Paul Kooij. As innovators, they were eager to get started and find a good use case to show the value of process mining within their organisation. But where to start and how to do it?

They decided to simply apply process mining on every dataset they could put their hands on. By doing this, they gained knowledge and experience and started making unexpected observations. One of the first experiments was to track the OV-Bike (a bike rental service) from ‘rented’ to ‘return’. They saw that a lot of the bikes seemed to be reported as stolen upon return. This was unexpected and further investigation revealed that many of the bikes got reported as stolen because the report stolen button was too close to the return button. This minor mistake lead to the ordering of too many new bikes.

Eager to find more, they started looking at how the lockers at the stations were being used. Especially if lockers are abandoned for more than 94 hours, it was required to check the locker and empty the content out of the locker. With process mining they were able to show that it would be better to wait an additional 48 hours before emptying the locker.

They continued to analyse even more complex processes such as the reporting and resolution of broken windows, escalators, elevators, etc. by benchmarking the quality and efficiency of resolving these failures for different channels, stations, and vendors. The experiments from Remco and Jacco are a fantastic example of how enthusiasm and persistence can help you grow from a process mining novice to achieving great results within just 1 year.

Do you want to start experimenting with process mining within your organisation? Watch Remco and Jacco’s talk now!


If you can’t attend Process Mining Camp this year, you should sign up for the Camp mailing list to receive the presentations and video recordings afterwards.

Leave a Comment

Get the BPI Web Feed

Using the HTML code below, you can display this Business Process Incubator page content with the current filter and sorting inside your web site for FREE.

Copy/Paste this code in your website html code:

<iframe src="https://www.businessprocessincubator.com/content/process-mining-at-the-dutch-railways-process-mining-camp-2017/?feed=html" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" width="100%" height="700">

Customizing your BPI Web Feed

You can click on the Get the BPI Web Feed link on any of our page to create the best possible feed for your site. Here are a few tips to customize your BPI Web Feed.

Customizing the Content Filter
On any page, you can add filter criteria using the MORE FILTERS interface:

Customizing the Content Filter

Customizing the Content Sorting
Clicking on the sorting options will also change the way your BPI Web Feed will be ordered on your site:

Get the BPI Web Feed

Some integration examples

BPMN.org

XPDL.org

×