Variants are sequences of activities, and they are their own dimension in process mining. They complement the process map by providing a scenario-based view of the process. Looking at the variants can give you many insights. But the crux is ensuring your variants are meaningful before you analyze them. Rudi and Anne show how to elevate them to the right level.

Finding your way to your business case as a process miner is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: You first have to do the analysis to determine the improvement potential. Rudi and Anne recommend keeping it simple, and Miguel shares how they increased revenue by 6 million Pesos (350,000 USD) without hiring additional people.

Andrea and Daniel discover process flows for the bus lines in Montevideo using open data from the city. They then export the XML process maps from Disco to display the discovered processes in the spatial city map. We discuss their project and Andrea and Daniel give you all the information that you need to reproduce their steps.

There is a lot of variability in Human Resources (HR) processes. This is only natural as people are different! And there is different legislation in different countries, different types of benefits, etc. We show two approaches for dealing with this complexity: One bottom-up approach and one top-down approach using the APQC standard process framework.

Hugo walks us through the analysis of the complaints process at the Dutch health insurance provider VGZ. As the data analyst, Hugo could use process mining to bring a fact-based view of the process to the subject matter experts. But he also needed to protect them from jumping to conclusions too early when the data was not good enough yet.

In Activity-Based Costing, indirect costs such as salaries and utilities are tied back to products and services. If you combine Activity-Based Costing with with process mining, then you can allocate costs to activities in your processes and evaluate “buckets of cases” according to their costs for the organization. Willem and Anne show how this works based on a concrete example.

What do you do if you want to do process mining but you don’t have any data? Tobias found an elegant solution: He created a system that allows employees to collect data about process executions in a lightweight and system-independent way. One advantage is that this internal system has privacy considerations built-in.

The data you find in information systems was not created for process mining purposes. So, often, you need to shape the data to make it suitable. Furthermore, different analysis questions may require particular views on the data. Together with Scott, we look at two concrete examples to illustrate the steps in such transformations.

Rudi and Anne talk about what it takes to make a good project plan. We first discuss the criteria for selecting a process for your process mining initiative and then go through the five ingredients of your project plan. Rather than just a big, scary document, the project plan is there for you and helps you manage the risks and communication points in the team.

If you are creative, you can find process mining data in unexpected places. Nuno shows us how he turned static data from an agricultural government funding program into a process view. After creating timestamps and activities from implicit information, he could analyze how farmers requested more or less aid over the years in the context of the development of their farms.