Why am I Waiting? Data-Driven Analysis of Waiting Times in Business Processes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a process mining method to analyze and decompose waiting times in business processes, identifying causes to improve cycle time efficiency, validated through real-life data.

Contribution

It presents a novel data-driven approach to decompose waiting times into causes and assess their impact on process efficiency.

Findings

The approach successfully identifies different causes of waiting times.

It demonstrates practical applicability on real-life process data.

The method improves understanding of process delays.

Abstract

Waiting times in a business process often arise when a case transitions from one activity to another. Accordingly, analyzing the causes of waiting times of activity transitions can help analysts to identify opportunities for reducing the cycle time of a process. This paper proposes a process mining approach to decompose the waiting time observed in each activity transition in a process into multiple direct causes and to analyze the impact of each identified cause on the cycle time efficiency of the process. An empirical evaluation shows that the proposed approach is able to discover different direct causes of waiting times. The applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated on a real-life process.