Advanced features

• Process Discovery Automatically construct a process model based on data representing the historic execution of the process (who and when did what on which case).
• Social Network Discovery The organisational aspect of a process can be discovered by automatically extracting a social network which shows how the people involved in the process interact.
• Process Animation A powerful visualisation method to gain a global insight into the historic execution of a process. As the cases flow through the process model, it is immediately clear where bottlenecks and potential problems exist.
• Performance Analysis For deeper analysis Futura Reflect offers advanced graphical analysis options.

Benefits

• Increased Process Awareness Process Mining makes explicit how business processes are executed by people, teams, departments or business units.This eliminates the well-known arguments about what was done or not: everyone can see everyone else's part in the process because Process Mining uses actual data from the system of the organisation itself.
• Remarkable reduction in the throughput time of process improvement projects Many process improvement projects in client organisations begin with inventarisation of the running business processes. With the help of Futura Reflect it is possible to significantly reduce the timespan of such projects since the process models it generates are compiled automatically based on data from the underlying system.
• Advanced features for auditing and compliance-checks Using Futura Reflect, client organisations are well equipped to periodically verify that their business units, departments and teams still work according to the guidelines, regulations and agreements as they were originally set by the government or the management. The technology makes it possible to periodically visualize business processes and compare them to the automatically generated results from previous periods.
• Clear and reliable insight into business processes by using animation When a process model is shown with all cases for the mined period running through it, the managers get a visual insight into the process bottlenecks. The use of animation enhances and quickens this process.
• Quantitative and qualitative information is quickly available and reusable Performance analysis in the context of process mining  yields valuable quantitative and qualitative information about the business process that can be used for process improvement, monitoring and forecasting. Besides, this information can be used as input for improvement methods like Six Sigma.
• Bottlenecks in ICT are brought to light The use of Process Mining does not only give more insight into business processes. Often it brings to light bottlenecks in the underlying and supporting systems reinforcing the classic and often uneasy relation between the business and the ICT. A  case study from the industrial servies shows that the results obtained with Process Mining exposed the fact that the information system of the client was not providing an optimal support for the business process: almost all activities in the process model are related to each other which indicates a lack of a structured process-oriented execution.

Process Discovery

Based on log files from information systems, Futura Reflect can completely automatically create a proces model without any knowledge of the process itself.

• Process model This a graph representing the dependencies between the the activities of the process. Every block is an activity and the arrows between the blocks show what is the execution order of the activities.
• Detection of parallelism In cases when multiple activities can follow after a given process step, Futura Reflect can automatically decide whether these activities are to be executed simultaneously (in parallel) or that a choice has to be made between theses activities.
• Simulation model The extracted process model is enriched with performance information that can be used by process simulation applications. The simulation information stored in the model includes for example arrival and processing times and their distributions. As this information is based on real data, it makes accurate simulation of the process possible.

Futura Reflect uses advanced genetic algorithms to extract process models. The challenge is to create a model which is as simple as possible  that describes as much as possible from the process. One can set a completeness target that determines how much of the historic behaviour of the process needs to be covered by the extracted model. This makes it possible to exclude exceptional cases.

Model that covers 60% of the process behaviour	Model that covers 80% of the process behaviour
Model that covers 100% of the process behaviour

Social Network

The social network describes how the executors of the process (employees/systems/departments/etc.) work together. The social network shows all involved and the arrows between them show who handed work over to whom. This makes explicit (among others) the answers of the following questions:

• Which employees receive a lot of work from others and which ones send a lot of work to others?
• In combination with Process Animation, who is busy and who is idle? How quickly is work taken up by the next employee in the chain?
• The same technique can be used to visualize other streams like for example the document stream in an editorial process in a publishing house.

Process Animation

Process Animation is a powerful tool that provides a quick method to gain an overview of the historic execution of a process. This is most useful when one is looking at the process globally (e.g. when asking questions like: Where and what kind of bottlenecks exist in the process?)

All cases present in the log file are shown in the animation as small balls. As the animation begins, the balls start running through the process model. Cases that took a long time to complete a given process step run slowly and cases that are handled quickly run faster.  A bottleneck is therefore easy to identify as a place where there is an accumulation of balls.

Depending on the availability of data in the log files, one can display extra process information as the animation plays. For example, the current average throughput time of cases with given priority or any other arbitrary property present in the data.

Performance Analysis

When a deep analysis of the problems related to a process is needed, Futura Reflect offers advanced visual reporting features that have specifically been designed with a process perspective in mind. For example, one can collect data at process, case or activity level and then aggregate it to perform specific slicing or use it for the purposes of performance analysis.