Process Discovery Driven Process Optimization: A Case Study to the Recruitment of State Personnel in Cameroon

Abstract

Process Optimization is a branch of business process management whose purpose is to reduce or eliminate time and resource wastage, unnecessary costs, bottlenecks, and mistakes while achieving the process objective. In the last decades, many practical contributions such as Six Sigma, Lean management, Lean Six Sigma and others have been proposed for optimization, and the associated tools have been widely used and appreciated within organizations. However, the main difficulty with these contributions is that it isn't clearly shown the scientific method used to understand or identify how exactly the actual processes are conducted before optimizing them. If the optimization process is carried out without really understanding how processes are actually going on, then the most likely outcome would be to continue executing outdated and incorrect processes. This paper try to address this difficulty by presenting a methodology for process optimization based on process discovery. Process discovery is a method concerned with extracting descriptive business processes from event logs within organization. The proposed methodology proceeds by comparing the process obtained after applying process discovery technique, with the process supposed to be executed. The result of this comparison combined with the way it had an impact on the business goals and customer's requirements are used to efficiently identify possible parts processes to be optimized. The utility of this methodology is demonstrated through its application to the Cameroonian state personal recruitment process. The descriptive process obtained showed that there were some unexpected tasks used in practice, and only 40.23% of files followed expected paths while executing the process. This analysis result has been used to efficiently define the control flow of the optimized absorption process.