Abstract
The improvement of business processes through learning and investigating workarounds has attracted research attention in recent years. Workarounds can be considered as a symptom of needed process improvements but adopting them does not necessarily lead to an appropriate one. Hence, identifying and understanding the underlying problems or perceived barriers that motivate workarounds is essential for suggesting an appropriate process improvement solution. In this paper, we propose a streamlined end-to-end approach that attempts to leverage workarounds to improve processes. This approach is based on two pillars: (1) a semi-automated workarounds detection by using the SWORD framework, which consists of twenty-two patterns to detect workarounds from events logs. (2) workarounds investigation and analysis using a motivational model that serves to reveal problems that lie under the identified workarounds. This analysis contributes toward proposing tailored and targeted process improvements. We report on an industrial case study that demonstrates the proposed approach, from workaround detection to proposing tailored process improvements. The improvements have been accepted by the organization and are currently being implemented.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Martins, P.V., Zacarias, M.: An agile business process improvement methodology. Procedia Comput. Sci. 121, 129–136 (2017)
Satyal, S., Weber, I., Paik, H.Y., Di Ciccio, C., Mendling, J.: Business process improvement with the AB-BPM methodology. Inf. Syst. 84, 283–298 (2019)
Vanwersch, R.J., et al.: A critical evaluation and framework of business process improvement methods. Bus. Inf. Syst. Eng. 58(1), 43–53 (2016)
Boudreau, P., Vieru, D., Paquette, G., Heon, M.: The workarounds process as a source of knowledge creation and management. In: Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), pp. 4292–4301. IEEE (2016)
Röder, N., Wiesche, M., Schermann, M., Krcmar, H.: Workaround aware business process modeling. In: Wirtschaftsinformatik, pp. 482–496 (2015)
Alter, S.: A workaround design system for anticipating, designing, and/or preventing workarounds. In: Gaaloul, K., Schmidt, R., Nurcan, S., Guerreiro, S., Ma, Q. (eds.) CAISE 2015. LNBIP, vol. 214, pp. 489–498. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19237-6_31
Van de Weerd, I., Vollers, P., Beerepoot, I., Fantinato, M.: Workarounds in retail work systems: prevent, redesign, adopt or ignore?. ECIS 2019 (2019)
Friedman, A., et al.: A typology of electronic health record workarounds in small-to-medium size primary care practices. J. Am. Med. Inform. Asso. (21) e78–e83 (2014)
Ferneley, E.H., Sobreperez, P.: Resist, comply or workaround? an examination of different facets of user engagement with information systems. Eu. J. Inform. Syst. 15(4), 345–356 (2006)
Röder, N., Wiesche, M., Schermann, M., Krcmar, H.: Why managers tolerate workarounds–the role of information systems (2014)
Koppel, R., Smith, S., Blythe, J., Kothari, V.: Workarounds to computer access in healthcare organizations: you want my password or a dead patient?. In: Driving Quality in Informatics: Fulfilling the Promise, pp. 215–220. IOS Press (2015)
Weinzierl, S., Wolf, V., Pauli, T., Beverungen, D., Matzner, M.: Detecting workarounds in business processes-a deep learning method for analyzing event logs. In: Proceedings of the 28th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) (2020)
Beerepoot, I., Lu, X., Van De Weerd, I., Alexander Reijers, H.: Seeing the Signs of Workarounds: A Mixed-Methods Approach to the Detection of Nurses’ Process Deviations (2021)
Beerepoot, I., van de Weerd, I., Reijers, H.A.: The potential of workarounds for improving processes. In: Di Francescomarino, C., Dijkman, R., Zdun, U. (eds.) BPM 2019. LNBIP, vol. 362, pp. 338–350. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37453-2_28
Soffer, P., Outmazgin, N., Hadar, I., Tzafrir, S.: Why work around the process? Analyzing workarounds through the lens of the theory of planned behavior. Bus. Inform. Syst. Eng. (2023)
Ajzen, I.: The theory of planned behavior: Reactions and reflections. Psychol. Health 26, 1113–1127 (2011)
Weinzierl, S., Wolf, V., Pauli, T., Beverungen, D., Matzner, M.: Detecting temporal workarounds in business processes–a deep-learning-based method for analyzing event log data. J. Bus. Anal. 5(1), 76–100 (2022)
Outmazgin, N., Soffer, P.: A process mining-based analysis of business process work-arounds. Softw. Syst. Model. 15(2), 309–323 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-014-0420-6
van der Waal, Wouter, Beerepoot, Iris, van de Weerd, Inge, Reijers, Hajo A.: The SWORD is mightier than the interview: a framework for semi-automatic WORkaround detection. In: Di Ciccio, C., Dijkman, R., del Río, A., Ortega, S.R.-M. (eds.) Business Process Management: 20th International Conference, BPM 2022, Münster, Germany, September 11–16, 2022, Proceedings, pp. 91–106. Springer International Publishing, Cham (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16103-2_9
Mannhardt, F., de Leoni, M., Reijers, H.A., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Balanced multi-perspective checking of process conformance. Computing 98(4), 407–437 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-015-0441-1
Beerepoot, I., Lu, X., van de Weerd, I., Reijers, H.A.: Seeing the signs of workarounds: a mixed-methods approach to the detection of nurses’ process deviations. In: Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), pp. 3763–3772 (2021). https://doi.org/10.24251/hicss.2021.456
van Eck, M.L., Xixi, L., Leemans, S.J.J., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: PM: a process mining project methodology. In: Zdravkovic, J., Kirikova, M., Johannesson, P. (eds.) Advanced Information Systems Engineering: 27th International Conference, CAiSE 2015, Stockholm, Sweden, June 8-12, 2015, Proceedings, pp. 297–313. Springer International Publishing, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19069-3_19
Miles, M.B., Huberman, A.M., Saldaña, J.: Qualitative Data Analysis: A Methods Sourcebook. 3rd edn. Sage Publications (2014)
Outmazgin, N., Soffer, P., Hadar, I.: Workarounds in business processes: a goal-based analysis. In: Dustdar, S., Eric, Yu., Salinesi, C., Rieu, D., Pant, V. (eds.) CAiSE 2020. LNCS, vol. 12127, pp. 368–383. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49435-3_23
Beerepoot, I., van de Weerd, I., Reijers, H.A.: Business process improvement activities: differences in organizational size, culture, and resources. In: Hildebrandt, T., van Dongen, B.F., Röglinger, M., Mendling, J. (eds.) Business Process Management: 17th International Conference, BPM 2019, Vienna, Austria, September 1–6, 2019, Proceedings, pp. 402–418. Springer International Publishing, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26619-6_26
Dubinsky, Y., Soffer, P.: Detecting the “Split-Cases” workaround in event logs. In: Augusto, A., Gill, A., Nurcan, S., Reinhartz-Berger, I., Schmidt, R., Zdravkovic, J. (eds.) BPMDS/EMMSAD -2021. LNBIP, vol. 421, pp. 47–61. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79186-5_4
Acknowledgement
The work was partly supported by the Israel Science Foundation under grant agreement 669/17.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Outmazgin, N., van der Waal, W., Beerepoot, I., Hadar, I., van de Weerd, I., Soffer, P. (2023). From Automatic Workaround Detection to Process Improvement: A Case Study. In: Di Francescomarino, C., Burattin, A., Janiesch, C., Sadiq, S. (eds) Business Process Management Forum. BPM 2023. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 490. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41623-1_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41623-1_22
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-41622-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-41623-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)