Marlon Dumas
2019 - 2024 • Advanced Grant
How has receiving an ERC grant influenced you as a scientist?
Thanks to ERC funding, we were able to spend an extended period of time just thinking and exploring the patterns of human behaviour in the workplace, and to accurately predict the impact of changes in a business process. With these findings, researchers are better equipped to go out and execute projects in the industry that we couldn’t execute before the ERC project.
The process improvement explorer: automated discovery and assessment of business process improvement opportunities
Business processes are the backbone of modern organisations. Their continuous improvement is key to achieving business objectives, whether in terms of efficiency, quality, compliance, or agility. A common task for process analysts is to discover and assess process improvement opportunities, but the current approaches are expert-driven: models and execution data are used to assess opportunities derived from experience and intuition rather than to discover them in the first place. The assessment is manual, and analysts can only explore a fraction.
The Process Improvement Explorer (PIX) aims to build the foundations of process improvement methods that do not exclusively rely on guidelines and heuristics but rather on systematic exploration of the space of possible changes derived from process execution data. PIX aims to develop conceptual frameworks and algorithms to analyse process execution data to discover possible improvement opportunities.
Results
The project has led to a set of methods and a toolset for automated improvement of business processes. The toolset, called PIX, analyses organisational data and generates ideas for improving one or more business processes. The PIX toolset explains to its users the benefits of each of the ideas it generates so that business users can make informed decisions to steer their processes towards better performance.
For example, when given access to data about a purchasing process at a manufacturing company, PIX may notice that when a purchase order is sent to a supplier in Brazil without adding a transport route, the order is late. Meanwhile, the opposite is true for Spanish suppliers—letting them choose their own transport route makes them work faster. The methods developed in this project automatically spot this difference by analysing the history of purchases and deliveries, and recommend attaching the transport route to orders from Brazil and not doing so for orders from Spain.
Impact
The outcomes of the project help organisations, both public and private, deliver services in a more efficient, timely, and predictable manner. In the case of public organisations, these improvements have a direct impact on the ability of citizens to access government services promptly while making smart use of limited resources. Meanwhile, private companies benefit from having more sophisticated methods to better serve their clients with financial sustainability.
Many companies have shown interest in the outcomes of the project. The research group regularly conducts consultancy and training for companies and public sector organisations across Europe and elsewhere. Many former students who have conducted research in the project team are now applying their knowledge and skills in large organisations, improving their business processes, or working for companies that develop software tools for business process analyses. In this way, many of the ideas emerging from the project are being applied in practice.