Minimizing Overprocessing Waste in Business Processes via
Predictive Activity Ordering
Ilya Verenich, Marlon Dumas, Marcello La Rosa, Fabrizio Maggi, Chiara Di Francescomarino
Presentation at CAiSE’2016 – Ljubljana, 15 June 2016
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Knockout section • One activity with a negative outcome “knocks-out” the case
• To avoid overprocessing, we should execute first the activity that will knock-out the case (if we knew it!)
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Minimizing overprocessing waste Execute highly selective tasks first.
Execute tasks that raise problems first Postpone expensive tasks until the end
Design-time approach (Aalst 2001) Our approach
Order checks by probability of case rejection and mean effort
• Reject probabilities and effort and constant for each case
• Does not take into account specifics of each case
• These values are specific for each case
• They are estimated via predictive models
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Processing effort and overprocessing waste
• Minimum processing effort:
• (actual) Processing effort:
• Overprocessing:
How can we know the actual processing effort?
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Expected processing effort
• Knockout section with three activities:
• Reject probability of an activity
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Expected processing effort (cont’d)
• Knockout section with three activities:
• Knockout section with N activities:
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Our approach
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Our approach
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Our approach
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Our approach
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Datasets
Bondora online P2P lending:• > 45K process cases• Knockout section with 3 independent activities,
P=(0.08,0.03,0.05)• > 30 case attributes
Environmental permit log (CoSeLoG project):• ca 1400 process cases• Knockout section with 3 semi-independent activities,
P=(0.01,0.01,0.61)• 4 case + 2 event attributes
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Evaluation of predictive models: ROC
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Number of checks required
• 1, if there will be at least one activity that will reject the case OR
• 3, otherwise
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Evaluation – reduction in # of checks
Avg # of checks reduced with our approach
Overprocessing is reduced
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Conclusion
• Using predictive models reduces overprocessing• Performance depends on the difference between average
rejection rate of checks• More experiments are needed for real-world scenarios (checks
can be dependent, etc.)
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Thank you
Q&A