Modern Analytics in Field and Service Operations
Businesses need to run their processes for field and service operations effectively and efficiently, providing good service at reasonable costs. Due to the changing nature of businesses including their environment and due to their intrinsic complexity, pr
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Modern Analytics in Field and Service Operations Martin Spott, Detlef Nauck, and Paul Taylor
Abstract Businesses need to run their processes for field and service operations effectively and efficiently, providing good service at reasonable costs. Due to the changing nature of businesses including their environment and due to their intrinsic complexity, processes may require adaptation on a regular basis. Modern analytics can help improve processes and their execution by extracting the real process from workflow data (process mining), pointing to problems like bottlenecks and loops, by detecting emerging or changing patterns in demand and in the execution of processes (change pattern mining). We will present a variety of the tools and techniques we have designed covering the above and give examples for their successful application.
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Introduction
With the industrial revolution, the introduction of mass production saw a drastic shift from artisanal crafting of products, usually performed by one person, to the large-scale production of goods, where each person was responsible for a single step in a process typically orchestrated by someone that was not involved in the execution. One of the first persons to define this series of steps as a formal process was Smith (1904), where he describes the series of steps required for the production of a pin. With increasing demand for goods, the increase in competition and the need for a reduction in costs required the reengineering of the existing processes. In most major companies, this was already being considered even before it was formally defined during the 1990s by Hammer (1990) and Davenport and Short (1990). They introduced a procedural approach for improvement of business processes to ensure
M. Spott (*) • D. Nauck • P. Taylor Research and Innovation, BT Technology, Services and Operations, Martlesham Heath, UK G. Owusu et al. (eds.), Transforming Field and Service Operations, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-44970-3_6, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
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correctness and to improve effectiveness, efficiency and compliance with statutes and protocols. In the present day, business processes are well understood and formally defined with standardised representations and associated reengineering procedures. Business analysts exploit these formal representations by defining performance measures and quality constraints to analyse and improve specific aspects of the enterprise. Such business improvement activity is based on the process captured and defined using a formal language. However with the increase of the complexity of the formal languages used to model processes, we witness an increase in the distance between the formal process model and the process that is actually being executed (Browning 2009; Cardoso et al. 2009). Large enterprises are required to actively respond to market demands and market evolution; therefore it is necessary to ensure control of crucial activities and to facilitate the reengineering of the processes running across th
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