Analyzing the Process Variations (or deviations) is one of the most common and important activity in a Process Mining analysis. Indeed this allows to see the number of “business bypass” (via the process deviations and variations) and how the business users are really managing the business process.

Classifying the Process Variations

When analyzing paths or variations of the process we can consider the entire process or part of the process. Usually we try to classify these processes in several families:

• The process as it “Should-Be” (most of the time it’s the process as it had been designed, in the best case it’s the “Happy Path”)
• The “Most Common Path” (this is the path mostly performed)
• The others Acceptable paths. For a business user standpoint these paths are acceptable even if they are not optimized and show somehow the lack of the process which has been designed at the beggining. Most of the time these varations are bypasses the business users were obliged to take to do their activities properly and in time. So analyzing these path drives regularly to several process optimizations (and re-design).
• The Non acceptable paths ! these paths should not be taken at all and typically being able to list these variations is key as they highlight non respect of business protocols.

Establishing some indicators on these three process families is really helpful especially for the coming analysis. 

Analyzing the process variations

During the PQA we had checked if the number of variations (or deviations) and their importance had a business sense. Now the goal is to move further with the “good” ones and to analyze these different deviations of the Process deeply.