What is it about?
Considering a business process that comprises hundreds of activities. Is it possible to suggest which activities should be outsourced in order to improve performance? This work tries to answer this question by following the positive deviance principles and by applying process mining techniques. To demonstrate our proposal, we use the case of a public organization.
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Why is it important?
We show that evidence-based process analytics can effectively support the relevant decisions. Moreover, researchers and practitioners of the field can benefit from the operationalizations of concepts that we propose and which connect process behavior to waste sources.
Perspectives
In every lean management textbook, one can read about the seven sources of waste (“7 Mudas”): Defects, Inventory, Motion, Over-processing, Over-production, Transport, and Waiting. However, it is not clear how Positive Deviance (also known as constructive deviance) (i.e., a phenomenon of positive variations that account for organizational advantages) can tackle those sources of waste. Moreover, it is also not clear how these sources can be exemplified within a log of events of the process execution. In this work, we proposed an approach to connect waste elimination actions to process analytics, and eventually to guide process improvement decisions. Following the proposed approach, process stakeholders can visually appreciate the elements of the process and get evaluated recommendations about the anticipated impact of the decisions. Moreover, they can use the numerical evaluations to set the performance requirements.
Pavlos Delias
Eastern Macedonia and Thrace Institute of Technology
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This page is a summary of: A positive deviance approach to eliminate wastes in business processes, Industrial Management & Data Systems, August 2017, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/imds-09-2016-0393.
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