Counting the Number of Process flow & Steps imported

Checking if the number of events or process flows may be the first and eaisiest check to do.

In the Blue Prism Process Intelligence solution example below, we can see in the home page the needed information directly displayed after importing the data:

Here we have 6,210 Process Flows (ie. Timelines in the ABBYY terminology). Aside of this number we can see on the right the number of Steps (events) : 156,630

These numbers- quite easy to get – really helps in determining if there was an import problem or if the choice of the 3 fields did not make sense.

Having a big gap between these two numbers can be a sign of such an issue. In this case we have a ratio of approx. 156,6306,21025 which is consistent. 

That means: we have on average 25 steps or events per Process Flow. 

On the contrary, having a low number like 1 to 3 could mean we did not correctly identify the Process Flow Identifier or another importing field. A too big number is also not a good sign as that could mean the Process Identifier may group several processes in one, or there’s too many steps in the process.

Counting the Unique number of Steps per Process Flow

A common behavior we can note on a Process Flow is to have several repetitions of the same Step. Sometimes the same step appears several times in a row (that typically happens when we get the logs from an application which polls regularly for a status change), but it is also possible to have a kind of loop between several different steps. Making a unique count enables us to remove these repetitions and to see the global consistency between Process Flow and Step Names.

Having a view of the distribution of this count is also interesting. The one below looks perfect as it’s a Normal one:

Calculating the Data Time Range

The Time range enables checking the duration of all the Process Flows imported. It’s a simple calculation which provides the global analysis range. On the example below we know our analysis is covering 418 days:

Calculating some statistics on the Process Flows duration

Below, ABBYY Timeline provides a quick view of the duration per date (cumulating the number of Process Flows). The curve shape can be a great indicator. in the example below we can see for example from the 7th of january 2022, it seems something had happened as the duration had increased dramatically.