Analyzing Times and Distributions

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to Analyze process flows and identify problems with your process.

Analyzing Times & Distributions

The time orientated widgets display developments in your process over time. For example, you can view cycle time over days and weeks, the amount of cases during a certain duration, the volume of help requests, and more!

Over Time Widget

See below a video that's showing orders per month with the over time widget.

Case Study (optional)

We now want display activities in our process over time by using the over time widget.

Now, it's time to get hands-on and get back to our case study!

  • Reopen you own investigation.
  • Create two over time widgets to answer the following questions:
    • In which month did we have the highest number of orders?
    • In which month did we have the highest order amount?
    • Is this somewhat similar for all the cities?

Findings from the Case Study!

Now that we've looked at the Over Time widget, we can now focus on the distribution of variables over time.

Distribution Widget

Distribution of duration attributes allows you to see how much time cases take to complete. You can select the data aggregation source (cycle time or duration) as well as the grouping criteria. For example, you can see how long it takes to process a order, grouped by product type or country.

Continue below to see a video on how to measure the process cycle time that's grouped by product type.

Case Study (optional)

As you have learned, distribution widgets help us to further investigate the distribution of attributes.

  • Reopen your investigation.
  • Create three distribution widgets to answer the following questions:
    • What is the average cycle time for all cases?
    • How is the average cycle affected by the product type i.e. what is the average cycle time for printed and non-printed T-shirts?
    • How is the average cycle affected by the customer type, i.e. what is the average cycle time for premium customers and for standard customers?

Findings from the Case Study!

Findings about Average Cycle Time

We found that the average cycle time for all of our cases is 15 days and 2 hours.

Findings about Average Cycle Time per Product Type

We can see that the process for printed shirts takes on average 16 days and 13 hours and for non-printed shirts 14 days and 3 hours.

The variance in cycle time is significantly higher for the printed T-shirts. We can see in the diagram that even with printed T-shirts there are some cases that have a low cycle time. But there are also several cases that have a very high cycle time. To summarize, the distribution diagrams show that the cycle times for both printed and unprinted T-shirts are spread over a wide range.

Findings about Average Cycle Time per Customer Type

Premium orders are finished on average after 9 days and 19 hours and standard orders are finished after 18 days and 2 hours.

Wrap Up: What have we learned so far?

Over TimeWith this widget you can display developments of your variables over time, accumulated by day, week, month, and year.
Distribution
  • With this widget you can create histograms based on time, so you can see how your data is distributed over time.

  • This does not just apply for time, you are also able to see the distribution of variables among different categories.

Now, that we've seen how to use time variables to better analyze our processes, we'll now look at Process Conformance widgets.

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