Optimizing Decision Making on Business Processes Using a Combination of Process Mining, Job Shop, and Multivariate Resource Clustering

Abstract

The current business environment has no room for inefficiency as it can cause companies to lose out to their competitors, to lose customer trust, and to experience cost overruns. Business processes within the company continue to grow and cause them to run more complex. The large scale and complexity of business processes pose a challenge in improving the quality of process model because the effectiveness of time and the efficiency of existing resources are the biggest challenges. In the context of optimizing business processes with a process mining approach, most current process models are optimized with a trace clustering approach to explore the model and to perform analysis on the resulting process model. Meanwhile, in the event log data, not only the activities but also the other resources, such as records of employee or staff working time, process service time, and processing costs, are recorded. This article proposes a mechanism alternative to optimize business processes by exploring the resources that occur in the process. The mechanism is carried out in three stages. The first stage is optimizing the job shop scheduling method from the generated event log. Scheduling the time becomes a problem in the job shop. Utilizing the right time can increase the effectiveness of performance in order to reduce costs. Scheduling can be defined as the allocation of multiple jobs in a series of machines, in which each machine only does one job at a time. In general, scheduling becomes a problem when sequencing the operations and allocating them into specific time slots without prolonging the technical and capacity constraints. The second stage is generating the resource value that is recorded in the event log from the results of analysis of the previous stage, namely, job shop scheduling. The resource values are multivariate and then clustered to determine homogeneous clusters. The last stage is optimizing the nonlinear multipolynomials in the homogeneous cluster formed by using the Hessian solution. The results obtained are analyzed to get recommendations on business processes that are appropriate for the company’s needs. The impact of long waiting times will increase service costs, but by improving workload, costs can be reduced. The process model and the value of service costs resulting from the mechanism in the research can be a reference for process owners in evaluating and improving ongoing processes.