Retrieving resource availability insights from event logs

Abstract

Resources are a critical component of a business process as they execute the activities. These resources, especially human resources, are not permanently available and tend to be involved in multiple processes. However, a company might wish to analyze or model a single process. To this end, insights need to be gathered on the availability of a resource for a particular process. This paper presents a procedure to retrieve daily availability records from an event log, which express a resource's availability for the process under analysis while taking into account (i) the temporal dimension of availability and (ii) intermediate availability interruptions. Both the daily availability records themselves and the resource availability metrics that are introduced allow managers and employees to gain understanding in resource allocation to a process. The outlined procedure and metrics are applied to a real-life call center log, showing the need to post-process the daily availability records. Post-processing increases their comprehensiveness and is required to obtain meaningful values for particular metrics.