Understanding the Meaning of Your Timestamps
In earlier articles of this series we already discussed how you can change your perspective of the process by how you configure your case ID and activity columns during the import step, and by combining multiple case ID fields and by bringing additional attribute dimensions into your process view.
All of these articles were about changing how you interpret your case and your activity fields. But you can also create different perspectives with respect to the third data requirement for process mining — Your timestamps.
There are two things that you need to keep in mind when you look at the timestamps in your data set:
1. The Meaning of Your Timestamps
Even if you have just one timestamp column in your data set, you need to be really clear about what exactly the meaning of these timestamps is. Does the timestamp indicate that the activity was started, scheduled or completed?
For example, if you look at the following HR process snippet then it looks like the ‘Process automated’ step is a bottleneck: 4.8 days median delay are shown at the big red arrow (see screenshot below).1
However, in fact the timestamps in this data set have the meaning that an activity has become available in the HR workflow tool. This means that at the moment that one completes an activity automatically the next activity is scheduled (and the timestamp is recorded for the newly scheduled activity).
This shifts the interpretation of the bottleneck
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