Analyzing Process Flows

Although it's common to use a connector to move data, let's focus on how to manually upload data.

A new Process Intelligence process works as your data bucket. It contains the event and the attribute log. Several adjustments to the process setting can be made as well, such as custom attributes, data views, etc. 

Continue to watch a series of videos on how to create a new process and analysis.  

Watch the video below on how to create a new process.

Next, look up your event log via the file explorer or just drag and drop your data file into the corresponding area. Afterwards, you can change the format of the time stamp or just select Import.

Now we want to upload the attribute log in a similar way. There is also the option to change individual attribute types during the import. If there are no adjustments, accept all suggestions and run the import.

Now your process is ready for the analysis. Back on the list of "all investigations" of this process, we can create a new investigation. 

Besides restricting the attribute view, you can also opt to map your process data to an existing BPMN model. This is provided by the SAP Signavio Process Manager.

Now the stage is set for the actual process mining task. Next, we will look at how to use the analytic tools to build up an investigation to target key questions and gain insights. 

In SAP Signavio Process Intelligence, an investigation gives insights into the changes needed to improve and optimize your process. An investigation is a direct visualization of the data that is stored in transactional systems. 

• Each investigation starts with the Process discovery, which gives insights into the different process variants from the most common path to non-conformance edge cases. It's basically a visualization of all executed events from the event log.
• Chapters lead the investigation with text descriptions of aims, objections, findings, observations etc., and are part of the overall structure of an investigation.
• In Process Mining the term Activity describes the different types of possible events. The term Event is most often used to describe individual executions of activities.

Here is an overview of the most important elements in your investigation.

Select each button to learn about the feature. 

Different widgets are used to tell stories on your investigation. Their main purpose is to explore and assess the interaction of events and key process factors.

There are different widgets that you can pick from. Choose which widgets you need based on your questions and targets. For example, there are widgets that focus on conformance checks, variance, or performance analyzing.

A widget basically represents a single analytical component.

Some widgets serve to calculate and present special key figures in a simple way, for example, Value.

Others are especially helpful to illustrate the ratio or distribution of certain performance indicators, for example, Over time, Distribution or Breakdown.

In order to reveal nonconformity or variations in the execution of the process, you can use Process Conformance, Variant Explorer, Process Discovery or Correlation.

More widgets like Case Table, Activity List or Diagram allow you to extend your analysis with additional explanations or information. 

• Processes representing  transactional data.
• One investigation covers only one specific topic.
• Chapters breakdown the results for clarity and filtering.

In SAP Signavio Process Intelligence, every analysis is built by using analytical widgets. This lesson focus on the 2 widgets that visualize process flows (variants) by backtracking the executed events.

Every analysis starts with the most important part, the discovery of a process! Within SAP Signavio Process Intelligence, the Process Discovery Widget focuses on visualizing the different executed flows (variants) of a process and providing an overview of the actual AS-IS state.

Select the play button to watch the video on the Process Discovery Widget.

The first widget of every investigation provides a view of the actual process flow from the standpoint of events. It can also be a good entry point go get an initial understanding of the sequence of events. Let's look at the image below of a process flow. Explore this main process flow in the Process discovery and try to answer the following question.

Apparently, not everything went as smooth as intended. Among others, we already observed failed shipments and canceled orders. Now that we gained initial insights into the process data, we want to further expand our analysis by determining important key parameters and KPIs.

Things did not go as planned. We see that goods are already shipped before the payment is done and that orders are canceled after the printing.

Now we know there are many ways of how the process has been executed. Which of them was the most time-consuming one? And how many exist at all? These questions can be answered by using the Variant Explorer!

Each different flow of events can be considered a process variant. The variant explorer, lists them up and provides insights to the most common/most expensive variant. 

While creating this widget, you can decide between with conformance or without conformance to filter the result, but this requires a linked BPMN to your data (we explain how to do this in the Process Conformance section).

• Which variant has the highest cycle time?
• What is the most common variant?
• Among the top 4 variants what is the process step with the highest duration?

Select each [+] marker for more details.

Now we want to understand the filtering options in SAP Signavio Process Intelligence. For example, maybe we want to narrow down our dataset to a specific set of cases. In addition, we will briefly look at the time aspect of our process with the help of more widgets.

We see that the most common variant includes the standard shipment (26% of all cases in the data set). 

We also spotted that the time between Ship Goods Standard → Receive Delivery Confirmation takes at longest, considering all cases included in the top 3 variants.

Now that we learned how our process works and which variants there are, we want to review what we've learned so far.

The entry point for getting an initial understanding of sequence of events. It provides a view of the actual process flow from the standpoint of events.

A process can take different paths. The variant explorer lets you investigate them and find interesting behaviors.

We already had a look at Process Discovery and the Variance widget. Filters are a great way to dive deeper into investigations. For example, could we filter for just the cases where a shipment faults or investigate only the cases with high order amounts? Since filters apply to every widget they can also be used with all other widgets. Let's have a look at them.

Simple filters - filters can be used to reduce the data set and focus on certain criteria. They help create a refined view of your process data and focus on aspects you're most interested in.

• Filters are additive
• Filters can be applied on the investigation, chapter, or even widget level
• Filters add or remove cases from the data
• Filtering impacts the widgets in the investigation
• For example, I want to filter cases for "premium" customers on a chapter 

Watch the video below on how to apply simple filters.

Findings: Premium customer order - By applying filters we found that out of all orders received (320), 154 of them are from premium customers. Order amount of premium customers - What we also found out is that the total amount spent by premium customers is 32,024.07€. We notice that this is close to half of the total order amount of 65,444.93€.

Now that we learned about process flows and filter conditions, let's continue on to learn about the widgets that analyze process performance!