Robotic Process

Automation in a Day
Lab 2.1 – Process mining: use process advisor to
analyze Contoso Coffee shop system event logs to
discover bottleneck processes

30 mins
June 2022
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Lab Overview
One key aspect of using automation is to discover the best process candidates to be automated.
Process advisor provided a set of tools to help you achieve that goal.

Process advisor’s process mining capability enables users to ingest system event logs, build rich
process maps and analytics, and gain valuable insight into how people work. Discovering how
processes are been performed in the system of record helps the user find inefficiencies during
their work process and best Return of investment areas to automate.

In this lab, you will learn as a Contoso Coffee shop business owner or data analyst, how to
upload invoice-related logs and use Process advisor to produce a process map that visualizes
the invoice and payment activities and processes. You can see which activities take the longest,
how many variations of the invoicing process there are, and what variations and actions take the
most time. Using this information and the powerful features in Process advisor, you can drive
automation improvements to make a difference for business.

Prerequisites
Before you start using Process advisor, make sure you have completed Lab 1.1 and 1.3
prerequisites.

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Getting Familiar with Process advisor
As the Contoso Coffee shop business owner or data analyst, you are aware of there are
manual, tedious work steps exist for your employees to process incoming invoices. However,
you do not have a clear understanding of where the bottle necks or the most time-
consuming part for this process therefore what is the best strategy to optimize or automate
it. You have learnt that Process advisor from Microsoft Power Automate could be a great
tool for you to discover process insights so you want to see how it can help. First you want
to get a little familiar with the tool itself.

1. Navigate to https://powerautomate.microsoft.com/ and click Sign in

2. Sign in with your test account

Note: Please make sure you have selected the correct environment that contains database
when completing this lab. You can use either the environment you created in lab 1.1, or the
environment provided by your instructor. You can switch between different environments by
clicking on the environment picker on the title bar.

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 3. Click on Process advisor. You will subsequently see a Getting things ready message.
Allow this process to complete, it will take a few minutes.

Note: For your first-time experience, you might see a tour box open, you can either
complete the tour or skip the tour.

4. In this example, you oversee invoicing at a company, and you want to check if the
processes have any inefficiencies. First, click on Show me Process Advisor – Finance.

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5. Process advisor will automatically create a process, import sample data for you, and
analyze it for you. You just need to wait a few minutes for the setup to finish.

6. Process advisor will automatically redirect you to the analytics page. Feel free to take
some time to click through the power tour to learn about the various elements you see.

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7. Let us look at the information and insights available on the Analytics page

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 You will see the following insights that have been mined out from the event logs:
1) The process map – it presents an overall view of the processes captured in the
event log. The flow represents how each invoice progresses through different
activities. Darker colors mean longer runtimes and thicker arrows represent
higher frequency.
2) Analytics – standard ones are average case durations, date filters, number of
cases, etc. A case is one execution of an invoicing process. A variant is a
specific path that an invoice has taken. They are good starting points to
getting insights on the process.
3) Variant information – You can see different variants identified in the data.
You can sort them by frequency or time and can select specific ones to update
the analytics.
4) Bar graphs – the charts show a breakdown by date to show any potential
patterns related to time.
5) Custom column filters – these attributes are the additional columns included
for analysis and provide additional filter options.
6) Time Analysis – this is a different view that focuses on the durations of each
activity or variant. You can check which activities have higher average duration
and the throughput time for activities, processes, and variants.
7) Share button – this button opens the panel to share your process and analytic
with other users by granting them the Viewer role to your process.

Please take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the different parts. You will
investigate the details next.

8. In the Variant information chart, click on the top item in Variant by frequency view to
see more detailed information on the most frequent activity flow.

9. The process map and analytics will be updated in real time to show specific information for this
top variant. For example, you can see that the average case duration is shorter than the overall

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 average of 7.02 days, that it represents almost half of the 133 total cases, and that this variant
represents refunding the customer.

10. You can hold control on the keyboard and click on another variant to view a subset of variants.
Click on the top variant again to deselect it and return to the overall view.

11. Now you can try to use the custom filter to try another view, click on the dropdown for the
Location custom filter and pick Seattle, USA.

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12. You will see all analytics being updated in real time specific to that location. Only some variants
apply to this location, and the average case duration is 2.71 days. Using custom filters provides
additional dimensions for you to analyze the process for insights.

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13. Try filtering for the San Diego location. What do you notice about the invoicing process
in this subsection of data?

14. Click on Time analysis to check runtime details. Note that since we filtered for San Diego,
this page will inherit the filter.

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15. You see Average Time spent by Activity (days) and Activity by Month (days) in the top
section. The bottom section shows total throughput times at different levels. Click on the
activity with the longest average time to see which variants and invoices it is a part of.
You can also see which months the activity occurs in.

16. Summary: armed with process analytics and insights, you are in a better position to start
optimizing the invoicing process in your business. In this example, you may want to dig deeper
into how the invoicing or refunding customer activities are performed. You can also compare
performances at different divisions if they can be identified via specific column values.

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17. To get started with your own event log data, learn more about the data requirements. You can
also learn more about the different templates available in Process advisor.

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Check your knowledge
Lab 2.1

5 minutes

1. Which analytics metric is always available?

A. Which person takes the longest time
B. The average case duration
C. Where the process took place
D. Which person takes the most steps when performing the process

Answer: B. The analytics page will always provide the average duration of the processes
presented in the current view. The other options require the event log data to include them in
the data ingestion in order to be used as custom filters.

2. How many analytical views are available in analytics?

A. Five
B. Fifteen
C. Fifty
D. Depends on your data

Answer: D. Any additional custom columns will increase the number of potential analytics
to be done. The event log can also contain a variable number of variants. Use Process
advisor to analyze the data to reveal the options.

3. In the sample process, did the invoicing process perform better in San Diego compared
to in Seattle?

A. True

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B. False

Answer: B. San Diego shows a longer average duration of 8.63 days, so it does not
perform better compared to Seattle’s 2.71 days average duration.

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