Big Data Research 25 (2021) 100210

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Using Big Data to Improve Safety Performance: An Application of

Process Mining to Enhance Data Visualisation
Anastasiia Pika a,1 , Arthur H.M. ter Hofstede a , Robert K. Perrons a,b,∗ , Georg Grossmann c ,
Markus Stumptner c , Jim Cooley
a
Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434, Brisbane QLD 4001, Australia
b
Centre for Strategy and Performance, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
c
University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The management of health and safety plays an important role in safety performance, and is therefore an
Received 11 October 2020 important foundational element in an organisation’s overall sustainable development. Many organisations
Received in revised form 19 January 2021 are now able to collect vast amounts of data to shed light on the underlying causes behind accidents and
Accepted 24 January 2021
safety-related incidents, and to spot patterns that can lead to solutions. Despite these well-intentioned
Available online 3 February 2021
Big Data collection efforts, however, accident statistics in asset-intensive industries remain stubbornly
Keywords: high as the data frequently fails to reveal actionable insights. In this paper, we answer Wang and Wu’s
Process mining (2020) [60] and Wang et al.’s (2019) [61] calls for the application of Big Data science to the safety
Industrial safety domain by exploring the potential of applying tools and techniques from process mining, a research
Big Data area concerned with analysing process execution data, to derive novel insights from and improve the
Permit to Work visualisation of safety process data. We demonstrate how these tools can yield useful insights in the
occupational health and safety domain by analysing process execution data from a Permit to Work system
in an Australian energy company. Specifically, the analysis presented here highlights the underlying
complexity of the organisation’s Permit to Work process, reveals conformance and performance issues,
and uncovers resources associated with conformance issues and changes in the frequency of such issues
over time, thereby underlining the need to simplify the system. Encouraged by these fresh perspectives
and insights delivered by process mining, we hope that this novel application will be a catalyst for further
research at the interface between these research disciplines.
© 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
As argued by Wang et al. [61], the management of health and
safety plays an important role in safety performance, and is there-
fore an important foundational element in an organisation’s overall
sustainable development. Occupational health and safety incidents
frequently result in significant costs both in terms of the human
dimensions of these events (e.g., [4]) and the financial conse-
quences that they have on the organisations in which they occur
[48]. Companies in asset-intensive domains like the energy or min-
ing industries have accordingly invested considerable resources on
a range of solutions to improve the management of health and
safety risks within these sectors [43,50].
*
Corresponding author at: Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434,
Brisbane QLD 4001, Australia.
E-mail address: perrons@alum.mit.edu (R.K. Perrons).
1
Anastasiia Pika was working at QUT at the time this work was done, she has
since left QUT.
“Permit to Work” (PTW) systems [17] have emerged as one ap-
proach to managing these risks. These systems prescribe steps that
must be performed by employees in order to minimise health and
safety risks. Such safety processes can be complex, and it is cru-
cial to understand how they are executed in practice in order to
identify opportunities for process safety improvements. The devel-
opment of Permit to Work systems have also given rise to a greater
degree of systematisation within safety systems, which in turn has
made it possible to measure and capture data about many aspects
of safety-related phenomena that had been more opaque before
[7]. When coupled with the quickly advancing data collection capa-
bilities within asset-intensive sectors [37], Permit to Work systems
have resulted in vast amounts of data being collected in an at-
tempt to shed light on the underlying causes behind incidents and
spot patterns that can lead to solutions [57,53].
Despite these well-intentioned data collection efforts, however,
accident statistics in several asset-intensive industries remain stub-
bornly high [11,32,53]. A recurring explanation behind this lack of
progress is that, although a lot of data about safety processes is

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bdr.2021.100210
2214-5796/© 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
A. Pika, A.H.M. ter Hofstede, R.K. Perrons et al.
increasingly recorded in the digital repositories of companies that
have occupational health and safety management systems (OHS
MS) [53], obtaining actionable insights from the data is challeng-
ing [43,50] because of the sheer size of these data sets [38]. The
literature has recently made progress towards leveraging Big Data
and modern analytical techniques in the safety science domain
[45,35], have overlooked the possibility of applying process mining
techniques as a way to approach the safety community’s Big Data
challenges. Process mining is a relatively new research area at the
intersection of business process management (BPM) and data an-
alytics, and it could be a very potent tool with which to help the
safety community use its data resources to improve safety perfor-
mance within a broad range of industries.
Process mining provides methods for extracting insights from
process execution data [56]. Such methods can discover how pro-
cesses are executed in practice rather than how organisations think
they happen (process discovery), and can uncover discrepancies
between the prescribed and actual process behaviour (process con-
formance), identify performance issues such as bottlenecks (pro-
cess performance analysis), analyse behaviours of employees han-
dling processes (organisational mining), compare processes, and
analyse their evolution over time. An input to process mining
methods is an event log which contains information about process
instance identifiers, activities and their timestamps and, in some
cases, may also contain other information (e.g., about resources in-
volved in the process). Information systems which support safety
processes often record the processes’ execution history in event
logs. Such logs can be analysed using process mining. In this paper,
we answer Wang and Wu’s [60] and Wang et al.’s [61] calls for the
application of Big Data science to the safety domain by exploring
the potential of applying tools and techniques from process min-
ing, a research area concerned with analysing process execution
data, to derive novel insights from safety process data. We will do
this by extending earlier investigations that make the case for PTW
systems [42,65] and taxonomies of different PTW systems [23] by
demonstrating various process mining methods in the context of a
PTW system in an Australian energy company. The application of
process mining will also significantly improve the data visualisa-
tion problem specifically pointed to by Wang et al. [61].
The application of process mining revealed a surprising amount
of complexity in the organisation’s occupational health and safety
process, identified where in the process deviations from the ex-
pected process behaviour often occur as well as resources associ-
ated with these deviations, uncovered process performance issues,
and showed that the number of process conformance issues is in-
creasing over time. These findings highlighted the need to simplify
the system. This could lead to a decrease in the number of process
conformance issues and contribute to an improvement of process
safety in the company.
The paper is structured as follows. We begin in Section 2 by
exploring the relevant literature from the different research areas
that come together in this topic–most notably including occupa-
tional health and safety and data analytics. We will then explain
the methodology in Section 3, including a concept-level descrip-
tion of the different phases of analysis that go into process mining.
It is worth pointing out that our Methodology section is longer
than usual in this paper precisely because the overarching objec-
tive of this paper is to showcase the application of methodologi-
cal approaches and analytical tools that have not been previously
used in the health and safety domain. Then, in Section 4, we will
demonstrate the application of process mining in the occupational
health and safety case study being used as a real-world exam-
ple in this paper to show the kinds of fresh insights and novel
perspectives that process mining can add. Finally, Section 5 puts
forward some concluding remarks, highlights the lessons learned,
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Big Data Research 25 (2021) 100210
and offers some suggestions with regards to directions for future
investigations in this area.
2. Literature review and research question
In this section, we introduce occupational health and safety
management systems (Section 2.1), provide an overview of existing
approaches to the measurement of occupational health and safety
performance and describe the associated challenges (Section 2.2),
discuss current applications of data analytics in the occupational
health and safety domain, and highlight the novelty of the use of
process mining in the domain (Section 2.3).
2.1. Occupational health and safety management systems
Occupational health and safety management systems (OHS
MSs) are used by organisations since the eighties to minimise the
risk of health and safety (H&S) incidents [43]. An OHS MS can
be defined as “a set of institutionalised, interrelated, and interact-
ing strategic H&S management practices designed to establish and
achieve occupational safety and health goals and objectives” [64].
Various studies highlighted the importance of such systems and
their positive impact on a safe work environment [33] leading to
enforcement of their use in legislations such as the directives im-
posed by the European Union on its member states [5]. However,
without enforced policies, the investing in an OHS MS can be a
daunting proposition for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) be-
cause of the costs involved, e.g., for certification, and the lack of
economic benefits visible in the short term [47].
2.2. Challenges in the evaluation of occupational health and safety
performance
To measure the effectiveness of OHS MSs and to justify invest-
ments in them, organisations need to evaluate different aspects
of such systems. This is often done with the help of indicators
[43,50] which can be measured and compared during different
stages of the system implementation and use. Such indicators are
also expected to uncover potential problems and “weaknesses in
the organisation’s procedures or employee behaviour” [50]. Organ-
isations may track hundreds of indicators and record large volumes
of the related data; however, they often find it challenging to ex-
tract value from the data [43,50].
A literature survey on the effectiveness of OHS MSs [46] found
that “many workplaces are not willing to make a commitment to
a large intervention like an OHS MS, let alone its evaluation” re-
lated to the fact that measurement presents conceptual, logistic
and resource challenges because of the complexity of such systems
and their environment. Measurement and monitoring of OHS MSs
presents an even bigger challenge to SMEs who have less resources
and are less able to effectively assess risks [5].
Poor safety culture in organisations was shown to be linked
to H&S incidents [34]. Various aspects of safety culture are of-
ten evaluated using questionnaires [17,59,43,10,28]; however, this
approach is costly and may be inefficient because answers of em-
ployees may be affected by social expectations and thus may not
accurately reflect reality [43].
In summary, although different studies have shown a positive
impact of OHS MSs on the workplace safety [33], there are many
challenges associated with the use of these systems, such as dif-
ficulties in the evaluation of the systems [46,43,5] and in justi-
fying investments in them [46,47], and challenges in extracting
actionable insights from the collected safety data [43,50]. The ap-
plication of process mining to safety data, proposed in this article,
could help to solve these challenges. Process mining techniques
can automatically discover processes from data, highlight various
A. Pika, A.H.M. ter Hofstede, R.K. Perrons et al.
Fig. 1. Example of an event log.
conformance and performance issues and produce intuitive visual-
isations that do not require expert knowledge for understanding;
thus, these techniques could make the evaluation of OHS MSs and
safety culture less challenging. Moreover, insights discovered by
process mining tools could provide clues for improving the work-
place safety in organisations.
2.3. Data analytics in the occupational health and safety domain
Although extracting insights from safety data presents a chal-
lenge to many organisations [2,9,13,43,50,53] argue that Big Data
tools may help to make “considerable progress” in organisations
in the oil & gas industry, and Podgorski [43] argues that organi-
sations should make use of indicators to better understand their
health and safety processes. However, it was not shown how this
can be achieved.
A few recent studies reported the use of Big Data tools in the
safety domain [53,45,36,44,49]. Tan et al. [53] described exam-
ples of application of Big Data tools to mitigate risks across sev-
eral industries: in the oil & gas industry workers used hands-free
checklists to reduce the likelihood of mistakes when assembling
equipment; built-in sensors were used in manufacturing to moni-
tor assembly operations, and Big Data analytics was used for risk
detection in supply chains. Rashidy et al. [45] presented a Big Data
modelling approach that can help to understand the factors associ-
ated with SPAD (Signals Passed At Danger) risk. Shi et al. [49] used
machine learning to predict risk levels of vehicles in driving and
[36] applied machine learning methods for road accident detection
from traffic condition data. Polyvyanyy et al. [44] presented an ap-
proach for discovery of causalities between events recorded in the
health and safety domain. Ouyang et al. [35] argue that research
on the application of Big Data in the safety domain is still limited
and “it’s important to realise that safety data is becoming expo-
nentially un-analysable with traditional statistics methods, most of
whose contributions fail to move beyond existing theories and rou-
tine application to tackle the dynamic and complex issues in terms
of volume, intensity and complexity, forcing a rethink on how to
exploit the vast values of safety data efficiently”.
We believe that process mining, a research area at the intersec-
tion of data analytics and BPM, might be able to add significant
value to this area. Process mining techniques were successfully ap-
plied across different industries and helped to uncover valuable
insights about processes and improve these processes in multiple
organisations. However, to the best of our knowledge, the possi-
bility of applying process mining to safety data has been largely
overlooked in the literature thus far. This leads us to:
Research Question: Can techniques from the process mining do-
main shed new light on large data sets in the occupational
health and safety area?
In our earlier work [40], we described some examples from a
case study in which we analysed process execution data of a safety
process. We use examples from this case study—including one ex-
ample presented earlier [40]—to illustrate the discussions in this
article.
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Big Data Research 25 (2021) 100210
3. Methodology and analytical approach
In this section, we describe the methodology and overall anal-
ysis approach followed in this study. We illustrate the approach
using examples from a case study in which we analysed a Permit
to Work system implemented in an Australian energy company.
3.1. Case study
The participating company has over 5,000 employees spread
across multiple industry sectors, including electrical power gen-
eration. The company had a total market capitalisation of under
USD$20 billion throughout this investigation, making it a “mid-
cap” player in the energy space—that is, a middle-sized firm by
market capitalisation with a substantial regional footprint, but
without a significant international presence. The company’s power
generation division was specifically chosen for this investigation
for two reasons: (1) the department was and is very committed to
reducing its injury and near-miss statistics and, consequently, (2)
the division made available its employees, managers, and Permit to
Work data repositories in the hope that the findings from this in-
vestigation could be used to help them achieve their OHS-related
goals.
The company communicates a strong commitment to health
and safety throughout the organisation and, as discussed ear-
lier, has in place 11 Life Saving Rules of which employees are
frequently reminded. The Life Saving Rules were implemented
in 2011, and violating them can carry serious consequences—
including termination of employment.
The Permit to Work system is the company’s safety process
which defines steps that must be followed by employees in or-
der to minimise health and safety risks. The participating company
had maintained an extensive database that captured the opera-
tional details of how the system had been operating over a period
of several years, including when permits were issued, and the na-
ture of the processes that were stopped and started en route to
delivering the intended objectives.
3.2. Process mining
To analyse the data, we used techniques from the field of pro-
cess mining, which is concerned with extracting insights from
process execution history recorded in event logs [56]. Such event
logs are often recorded by information systems supporting busi-
ness processes (or can be created by collecting and consolidating
information from different sources) [56]. The occupational health
and safety domain records huge volumes of data [43,50] including
information about safety processes.
Process execution data often includes information about process
instance identifiers (i.e., case IDs), process steps (i.e., activities),
and their timestamps and can include information about resources
involved in the process and process-related data. Fig. 1 depicts an
example of an event log which contains process execution data of
a safety process. Each row corresponds to an event in the process
and each column represents an attribute of the event. For exam-
ple, we can see that in case 12345 a permit to work was created
A. Pika, A.H.M. ter Hofstede, R.K. Perrons et al.
by employee R1 on 3/01/2018, risk assessment was performed by
employee R2 the next day and it was started at 11:12 and com-
pleted at 15:08. We can also see that case 12345 is not urgent
(urgency = low), while case 12346 is urgent.
Process mining provides a range of techniques which allow to
analyse such event logs and obtain insights about different as-
pects of process executions. Process mining algorithms require the
following attributes to be recorded in the log: process instance
identifiers, activities and their timestamps. Some process mining
methods may require additional information to be recorded in the
log; for example, activity types (e.g., start and complete), resources
involved in the process (e.g., employees or teams) or process data
(e.g., urgency). Some methods may also require additional inputs
such as process or organisational models.
We used process mining to analyse process execution data from
the Permit to Work system implemented in the case study com-
pany. Information about the Permit to Work system was recorded
by different information systems. The data was provided by the
collaborating organisation, and we worked with company repre-
sentatives who have knowledge of the process and the information
systems to collect and interpret the data. We created an event log
which included information required by process mining techniques
(i.e., case IDs, activities, activity completion times and resources).
Consisting of 494,568 independent events related to 632 differ-
ent employees between 28 March 2008 and 8 December 2016, the
event log contained information about 43,061 cases that were re-
lated to 23 distinct activities.
We acknowledge that a data set consisting of slightly less
than half a million independent events falls below some people’s
threshold for “Big Data,” but we respectfully submit that this char-
acterisation is at once helpful and constructive in this particular
instance. There are two reasons for this. First, people from differ-
ent technical backgrounds face different operational realities, and
definitions of Big Data have accordingly popped up in a discipline-
specific way, covering a disparate range of professions and disci-
plines as diverse as obesity research [58], nursing [62], and cloud
computing [24]. These communities have mostly failed to agree on
exactly what Big Data is on account of the fact that the term is still
loaded with conceptual vagueness [16]. It therefore follows that,
although a data set outlining half a million independent events
might not feel like Big Data to researchers fascinated by the tech-
nical boundaries of Big Data tools and techniques, it is significantly
larger than the occupational health and safety discipline is used to
handling [53]. Second, beyond merely showcasing a simple appli-
cation of existing Big Data approaches, this paper will demonstrate
process mining methods in an attempt to show how they can add
value to other types of Big Data analyses. We argue that this point
can be compellingly made on a data set that does not test the
technical limits of Big Data capabilities.
3.3. Explanation of approach
To analyse the event log, we used the process analysis tool
Disco2 and the open source process mining framework ProM3
which supports most existing process mining methods. The process
mining analysis was divided into five phases: (1) process discovery,
(2) process conformance, (3) process performance, (4) organisa-
tional mining, and (5) process change. The motivations for each
of these phases—including how, specifically, each part of the anal-
ysis was carried out, and what trends and patterns can be seen as
a result—will be explained in turn in subsections 3.3.1 to 3.3.5.
2
https://fluxicon.com/disco/.
3
http://www.promtools.org.
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Big Data Research 25 (2021) 100210
3.3.1. Process discovery
In order to minimise health and safety risks, many organisa-
tions introduce safety processes such as Permit to Work systems
[17]. Such processes aim to reduce risks associated with the execu-
tion of hazardous activities by prescribing steps which employees
must complete before or after the execution of the hazardous ac-
tivities [27], e.g., they may need to assess risks, obtain approvals
for certain types of work or isolate the work site.
Many processes—including OHS MSs—are becoming increasingly
complex and, to manage this trend towards increasing complexity,
to communicate processes more effectively, and to improve op-
erational efficiency, many companies use process modelling [56].
Process models describe the ordering of process activities (the
control-flow perspective), they may also specify how resources in-
teract with the process (the organisational perspective), how data
is used in the process (the data perspective) or define temporal
properties of the process (the time perspective). Processes can be
described using different notations, for example Petri nets, BPMN,
YAWL, or EPCs [56].
Concurrent processes were first modelled using Petri nets and
this notation is used by many process mining approaches [56].
Petri nets have formal semantics and can be analysed using a num-
ber of techniques [55]. A Petri net is a directed bipartite graph
which has two types of nodes called places (depicted by circles)
and transitions (depicted by rectangles) [55]. When Petri nets are
used to model business processes, transitions represent activities,
places represent conditions and directed arcs are used to model
causal dependencies between them [55]. Fig. 2 depicts an exam-
ple of a Petri net which specifies the expected flow of 12 major
process steps in the Permit to Work system we analysed.
Places in a Petri net can hold tokens represented by black dots
(e.g., in Fig. 2 place start holds one token). A transition can fire, i.e.,
an activity it represents can be executed, if all of its input places
hold at least one token. When a transition fires it removes one
token from all of its input places and puts one token in all of its
output places.
If a place is an input to more than one transition (e.g., in Fig. 2
the input place to transition PTW Surrendered), it represents a point
in the process where a choice is made (e.g., either transition PTW
Surrendered fires, i.e., activity PTW Surrendered is executed, or the
silent transition connected to the same input place fires, which
represents skipping of activity PTW Surrendered).
If a transition is an input to more than one place, it represents
a point in the process where parallel execution starts. For exam-
ple, in Fig. 2 the sequence of activities RFA Created, RFA Approved,
PTW Created is executed in parallel to the sequence of activities
PTW RA Created, PTW RA Authorised. The silent transition that fol-
lows these two sequences represents a synchronisation point—that
is, the process cannot continue until both sequences are completed
(the silent transition can only fire when both of its input places
have a token).
BPMN is another process modelling notation which has recently
become “one of the most widely used languages to model busi-
ness processes” [56] and is easy to understand for business users
[19]. Main elements of the BPMN language include activities (de-
picted by rectangles), control nodes (depicted by diamond shapes)
and connecting arcs [14]. Control nodes, called gateways, can be of
two types: splits, which represent process points where the flow
diverges, and joins, which model process points where the flow
converges [14]. The abovementioned BPMN elements are related to
the control-flow perspective, BPMN also provides constructs which
allow to model other process perspectives, such as the organisa-
tional or the data perspectives [14]. Fig. 3 depicts a process model
of the Permit to Work system modelled using BPMN.
Manually created process models represent desired or expected
process behaviour. As is the case with all models, hand-made pro-
A. Pika, A.H.M. ter Hofstede, R.K. Perrons et al.
Fig. 2. Process model of 12 major steps of the Permit to Work system specified as a Petri net (RFA – request for access, PTW – permit to work, PTT – permit to test, RA –
risk assessment).
Fig. 3. Process model of 12 major steps of the Permit to Work system specified using BPMN.
cess models often simplify reality. Such models may not include all
possible process execution scenarios, are often subjective [56], and
may represent views of a limited number of stakeholders involved
in process modelling activities.
Moreover, employees involved in processes do not always fol-
low the processes as expected. Hence, real processes may be sig-
nificantly different from those described by hand-made process
models. Understanding how processes are executed in real life is
the first crucial step towards improving their performance.
Process discovery is an area of process mining concerned with
discovering process models from event logs. A number of pro-
cess discovery algorithms have been proposed. They take as input
an event log which contains information about process instance
identifiers, activities and their timestamps and produce a process
model using some process modelling notation, e.g., Petri nets [56].
Event log data is not always accurate and complete, and process
discovery algorithms need to be able to work with such data.
While earlier process discovery algorithms, such as the alpha-
miner [55], could not handle such logs, more advanced process
discovery algorithms, e.g., the inductive miner [29], can discover
models from such data. Some process discovery tools, e.g., the in-
ductive visual miner [30] or the Disco miner [21], allow to filter
process behaviour (e.g., only select mainstream process behaviour)
and discover process models with respect to this behaviour. Such
a capability can help to explore complex processes.
Process discovery algorithms help to uncover how processes are
executed in practice and they may provide a number of insights
about processes. For example, a manager may discover that a real-
life process is more complex than expected, that employees often
skip a critical process step (e.g., an approval) or that some activi-
ties are performed too late (e.g., risk assessment). Such discoveries
5
Big Data Research 25 (2021) 100210
in the occupational health and safety domain may highlight sig-
nificant safety risks (e.g., not informing all involved parties about
maintenance work can lead to accidents [27]) and provide insights
for process improvement (e.g., highlight the need for simplifica-
tion).
3.3.2. Process conformance
Process conformance analysis aims to discover where in the
process and how often deviations from the expected process be-
haviour occur. Process discovery can provide some insights into
process conformance, e.g., by inspecting a discovered process
model one may notice that an important part of the process is not
always followed. However, if a process is complex (e.g., the one de-
picted in Fig. 4) it can be difficult to analyse process conformance
by looking at a discovered process model. Process conformance
issues in the health and safety domain may be associated with sig-
nificant health and safety risks, e.g., not following Permit to Work
systems may lead to maintenance-related accidents [27]. Hence,
locating such issues and understanding their nature is of critical
importance.
Process conformance analysis takes as input a normative pro-
cess model which specifies the expected process behaviour and
an event log which captures information about actual process
executions. Process conformance analysis techniques aim to find
discrepancies between the log and the model. An example of a
conformance analysis approach that can discover control-flow non-
conformances is an alignment-based process conformance analysis
technique [54]. The technique creates the so-called alignments by
relating events in the log to elements of the normative process
model (specified as a Petri net) and highlights discrepancies be-
tween the prescribed and the observed process behaviour. The
A. Pika, A.H.M. ter Hofstede, R.K. Perrons et al.
Fig. 4. High-Level Overview of the Permit to Work system. Note that our objective with this figure is to show how “spaghetti-like” and unintelligible the system was in the
initial analysis. We have accordingly elected to present it here as a high-level overview in which practically no details can be seen. If readers are frustrated by the inability
to see meaningful details in this particular figure, then that was our point.
output of the technique is the normative process model whose el-
ements are annotated with alignment frequency information (e.g.,
an example of such a model is depicted in Fig. 6).
Process conformance analysis can also be performed consid-
ering other process perspectives, such as the resource and the
data perspectives [12]. Such analysis requires that relevant pro-
cess information (e.g., process resources and data) is recorded in
the event log and described by the normative process model. The
analysis enables the discovery of process conformance issues that
are not related to the control-flow perspective. For example, when
considering the resource perspective, one may learn that important
activities (e.g., risk assessments or approvals) were performed by
unauthorised employees. Another example of a conformance issue
that could be identified is a violation of the separation of duties
(“four-eyes”) principle [1], i.e., when two activities that must be
performed by different employees were performed by the same
employee.
3.3.3. Process performance
Safety processes such as Permit to Work systems have to be
efficient in order to achieve their goal of minimising safety risks.
Poorly performing safety processes are less likely to be followed
by employees; for example, if obtaining an approval is taking too
long, employees may be more tempted to skip the step. Such be-
haviour increases safety risks and can eventually lead to incidents.
For example, it was shown that poor Permit to Work systems con-
tributed to maintenance-related accidents [27].
In order to improve the performance of a process, an organisa-
tion needs to be able to first identify process performance issues.
This can be achieved with the help of process performance analysis
techniques that can evaluate various aspects of process perfor-
mance by analysing process execution data. These techniques usu-
ally take as input an event log and a process model, align the log
and the model, and calculate and visualise different process per-
formance metrics [56]. The types of analysis that can be performed
depend on the types of events recorded in the log. For example, if
the log only contains complete events, then one can only analyse
times between activity completions; however, if the log also con-
tains start events, then it is possible to consider activity durations
and waiting times. A typical output of a process performance anal-
ysis tool is a process model annotated with performance-related
information, e.g., it can show average activity durations or me-
dian waiting times. Some tools, such as ProcessProfiler3D [63], can
also compare and visualise the performance of different process
cohorts, e.g., the performance of cases related to planned mainte-
nance and those related to major forced outages [40].
Process performance analysis can help to identify process per-
formance issues such as bottlenecks (e.g., activities with long ex-
ecution or waiting times) or process variants with long execution
times. For example, using process performance analysis tools one
could uncover a process performance issue described by Iliffe et
al. [27] when permits were only issued during a specific time of
the day, thus causing delays in the commencement of maintenance
works. Once such issues are identified, organisations can make
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necessary changes to improve process performance (e.g., they can
enforce new policies or balance workload of their employees).
3.3.4. Organisational mining
Human factors are cited as one of the leading causes of safety
incidents across various industries [6,17,25]. Understanding work
behaviours of employees can help to identify and eventually elim-
inate safety risks related to human actions. Organisational mining
is an area of process mining which allows to discover insights
about different aspects of employee behaviour from event logs.
Such event logs must contain information about resources (i.e.,
employees) who executed process activities. Organisational min-
ing techniques can help to discover organisational models and
social networks, and by uncovering actual social structures in an
organisation, they can provide insights for process improvement
[51]. Organisational mining can also help to analyse behaviours
of teams or individual employees, e.g., this can be done with the
help of an extensible framework for resource behaviour analysis
[39]. The framework consists of three modules which allow to: 1)
extract descriptive information about different aspects of resource
behaviour related to employee skills, utilisation, preferences, pro-
ductivity, and collaboration; 2) evaluate resource behaviour; and
3) evaluate resource productivity. The framework also provides an
interface which allows users to define their own measures of re-
source or process behaviour. Organisational mining techniques can
shed light on how employees handle safety processes and can help
to uncover hazardous patterns of employee behaviour. For exam-
ple, one could discover that some employees often skip a crucial
process step or do not perform their work thoroughly (e.g., per-
form risk assessment too quickly).
3.3.5. Process change
In modern business environments which are increasingly com-
petitive and dynamic processes often change over time [8,31]. Such
changes may be instigated by an organisation’s process improve-
ment initiative, by introduction of new legislation a company must
comply with [8] or they may be unplanned and related to changes
in the ways employees handle processes [31], e.g., over time, em-
ployees may start following a specific process path or skipping
a process step more frequently. Such changes in processes can
be identified by analysing process execution data. Process mining
techniques that can uncover process changes include methods for
the detection of process drifts [8,31] which can identify changes
in the control-flow perspective, an approach for evaluation of the
overall process risk [41] which can consider multiple process per-
spectives (e.g., the organisational or the data perspective), and
an extensible framework for analysing resource behaviour which
allows to track the evolution of given employee or process be-
haviours [39].
Timely identification of hazardous changes in safety processes
(e.g., identification of an increase in the number of process con-
formance issues) could help in incident prevention. Process mining
can detect such changes on a process level [8,41,31] or it can help
uncover changes in specific process behaviours [41,39].
A. Pika, A.H.M. ter Hofstede, R.K. Perrons et al.
4. Results and discussion
In the previous section, the main analytical parts of process
mining—specifically, process discovery, process conformance, pro-
cess performance, organisational mining, and process change—
were explained at a conceptual level. In this section, we will exam-
ine the case study data through each of these five process mining
lenses and, in so doing, show the type of novel insights and fresh
perspectives that can be made available with each of them.
4.1. Process discovery
To learn how the Permit to Work system is actually executed,
we used a process discovery tool called “Disco Miner” [21]. The
tool mines a fuzzy model which is “intuitively understandable” by
users without prior process mining experience [21], The input to
the discovery tool is an event log with process instance identifiers,
activities, and timestamps. We applied the tool to the event log
described in Section 3.
The discovered model, shown in Fig. 4, demonstrated the com-
plexity of the Permit to Work system. Further exploration of the
process in Disco revealed that the process has 2,306 variants. The
model was demonstrated to company representatives and they
were impressed by the discovery result. A company representa-
tive noted that the complexity of the process was cited by some
process participants as a cause of productivity losses and inad-
vertent process compliance issues. The discovery result highlighted
the need to simplify the process and inspired the company to con-
sider a process simplification initiative.
We used Disco’s filtering capabilities to discover mainstream
process behaviour. Specifically, we selected 51% of the cases that
followed frequent process paths, and discovered a process model
only considering these cases. The discovered fuzzy model is de-
picted in Fig. 5. Rectangles represent activities in the process and
directed arcs show causal dependencies between them. The model
also shows how often different paths were followed in the process.
For example, we can see that activity PTW_Created was directly fol-
lowed by activity PTW Approved in 22,223 cases. Fig. 5 shows that
the process followed by the majority of cases is much simpler than
the process discovered from all process instances (Fig. 4). Further
exploration in Disco showed that the selected 51% of cases only
follow six process variants, while the remaining 49% of cases fol-
low 2,300 process variants (indicating that many process paths are
only followed by a few cases). To investigate exceptional process
behaviour, we used process conformance analysis.
4.2. Process conformance
To analyse process conformance of the Permit to Work system,
we used an alignment-based process conformance technique (van
der Aalst, Adriansyah et al. 2012) described in Section 3.3.2 and
implemented as ProM plug-in. A normative process model of the
Permit to Work system was created based on the process docu-
mentation. The model specifies the expected behaviour of 12 major
process steps (Fig. 2). We used the event log described in Sec-
tion 3 and filtered out those activities which are not specified by
the normative process model. The resulting event log was replayed
on the process model using the conformance checking plug-in. The
plug-in output is depicted in Fig. 6. Activities in the process model
that were not always aligned with the corresponding events in the
event log are highlighted with red. Every activity is also annotated
with the alignment frequency information, i.e., the number of pro-
cess instances in which the activity was aligned with the event log
and the number of process instances in which the alignment was
not created. For example, as depicted in Fig. 6, activity PTW Cre-
ated was aligned with the event log in 42,290 cases (i.e., it was
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Big Data Research 25 (2021) 100210
executed as expected in these cases), but in 771 cases the align-
ment was not created (i.e., in these cases the activity was either
not performed or it was performed in a wrong place in the pro-
cess, e.g., it was executed earlier than prescribed by the process
model).
We used a BPMN version of the normative process model de-
picted in Fig. 3. BPMN is widely used to model business processes
[56], and is easy to understand for business users
[19] and highlighted activities in this model with different
colours based on the frequency of alignments: activities high-
lighted with green were aligned with the log in all cases, for
activities highlighted with yellow, alignments were not created in
some cases, and for those highlighted with red, alignments were
not created in many cases. The resulting model, depicted in Fig. 7,
was demonstrated to company representatives. As we can see from
Figs. 6 and 7, most non-conformances occurred during the first
part of the process and were often related to approvals and risk
assessment. The second part of the process was executed as ex-
pected in most process instances, with a few discrepancies related
to activities PTT Issued and PTW Withdrawn.
The conformance checking plug-in allowed us to quickly locate
parts of the process where non-conformances frequently occurred.
To better understand the nature of these non-conformances, we
checked those parts of the process where they occurred using
Disco. As an example, consider activities RFA Created, RFA Ap-
proved, and PTW Created. According to the normative process mod-
els shown in Figs. 2 and 3, these activities are expected to be
performed sequentially. The conformance checking result (Figs. 6
and 7) shows us that, in many cases, alignments were not created
for these activities. We filtered the event log so that only events
related to these three activities were kept and explored the result-
ing log in Disco (Fig. 8). Fig. 8a depicts the frequencies of different
paths these three activities took in the process (e.g., activity RFA
Created was followed by activity RFA Approved in 37,015 cases, but
in 4,011 cases activity RFA Approved was followed by activity RFA
Created). Fig. 8b depicts median durations between these activities
(e.g., the median duration between activities RFA Created and RFA
Approved is 16.5 hours, while it is only 22 seconds between activi-
ties RFA Approved and RFA Created).
Fig. 8a shows that the three activities were executed as ex-
pected in most process instances; however, for example, in 4,011
cases RFA Approved was performed before RFA Created and in 1,891
cases PTW Created was performed before RFA Approved. Looking
at the median durations between the activities helped us to ob-
tain further insights into the nature of these deviations. Fig. 8b
shows that the median duration between activity RFA Approved
and activity RFA Created is only 22 seconds. Since in most cases
the two activities were executed within a few seconds, this indi-
cates that this deviation from the expected process behaviour is
more likely related to a configuration of an information system
supporting the process rather than to employee behaviour. How-
ever, in those process instances where activity PTW Created was
performed before activity RFA Approved the median duration be-
tween the two activities is 5.7 days, indicating that this behaviour
could be a process conformance issue that should be investigated
further.
4.3. Process performance
To analyse the performance of the Permit to Work system, we
used an alignment-based performance analysis approach [54] im-
plemented as a ProM plugin. The plug-in takes as input a Petri net
and an event log, replays the log on the model, and calculates and
visualises selected process performance metrics. It can produce dif-
ferent types of process performance visualisations, such as a Petri
net annotated with performance information (e.g., showing aver-
A. Pika, A.H.M. ter Hofstede, R.K. Perrons et al.
Fig. 5. Six most frequently followed paths in the Permit to Work system (followed by 51% of cases).
age execution times) or a table which shows values of a selected
process performance metric between different process steps (e.g.,
the table depicted in Fig. 9).
We used the model and the event log described in the previ-
ous section. The event log only contained complete events and did
not contain start events. As a result, we could only consider the
time between activity completions. Fig. 9 shows the average time
between pairs of activities visualised by the plug-in.
We annotated the BPMN model of the process (depicted in
Fig. 3) with the process performance information depicted in Fig. 9,
resulting in the model shown in Fig. 10. The annotated BPMN
model was demonstrated to the company representatives.
As shown in Fig. 10, the longest average duration in the process
is between activities PTW Issued and PTT Created (23.01 days). An-
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Big Data Research 25 (2021) 100210
other long average time is between activities PTW Issued and PTW
Surrendered (17.13 days). Activities PTT Created and PTW Surrendered
are not always performed in the process (the normative process
model allows skipping both activities). We checked the median du-
ration of cases in which these activities were performed and those
in which they were not performed using Disco. We discovered that
there were significant differences in the performance of these pro-
cess variants: the median duration of cases in which both activities
were performed was 39.2 days, while the median duration of cases
in which they were not performed was only 14.1 days. The plug-in
visualised the process performance and highlighted performance
issues; however, we did not investigate the underlying causes of
these issues and the ways to overcome them, it is a direction for
future work.
A. Pika, A.H.M. ter Hofstede, R.K. Perrons et al. Big Data Research 25 (2021) 100210

Fig. 6. Conformance checking result for 12 major steps of the Permit to Work system shown in Fig. 2. Figs. 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 were originally created with the ProM
software tool described elsewhere in this paper, but the resulting figures created by ProM were not very easy to see. These figures were therefore recreated using a graphics
program to make them more legible—but we do want to emphasise that ProM does not actually make them look like this in the first instance. (For interpretation of the
colours in the figure(s), the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Fig. 7. BPMN model of 12 major steps of the Permit to Work system; activities are coloured based on the frequency of alignments between the model and the event log as
shown in Fig. 6 (green – alignments were created in all cases, yellow – alignments were not created in some cases, red – alignments were not created in many cases).

Fig. 8. Frequencies of different paths in the Permit to Work system followed by activities RFA Created, RFA Approved, and PTW Created (a); and median durations between
the three activities (b).

4.4. Organisational mining
To analyse behaviours of employees involved in the Permit to
Work process, we used the framework for resource behaviour anal-
ysis (described in Section 3.3.4) which is implemented as ProM
plug-in.4 We used the first module of the framework which ex-
tracts values of resource behaviour indicators from an event log
and visualises their evolution over time.
4
https://github.com/a-pika/MiningResourceProfilesPlugin.

9
A. Pika, A.H.M. ter Hofstede, R.K. Perrons et al.
Fig. 9. Average time between completions of major steps of the Permit to Work system (in days).
Fig. 10. BPMN model of the major steps of the Permit to Work system annotated with information about the average time between activities (in days).
Here, we present an example of resource behaviour analysis
related to process conformance. We defined an indicator which
counts the number of process instances started during a given
time slot in which one given activity was performed by a given
employee before another given activity. The indicator was used to
check how often different employees were associated with one
type of process conformance issue: the execution of an activity
sooner than prescribed by the process model. We used the event
log described in Section 3.
We learned that the number of non-conformances associated
with different employees varies and that for some employees it is
changing over time. As an example, Fig. 11 depicts quarterly val-
ues of the indicator for three selected employees (anonymised): it
shows the number of cases in which activity PTW Created was per-
formed by a given employee before activity RFA Approved (as we
can see from Fig. 2, such process behaviour is a deviation from the
expected process flow). We can observe, for example, that employ-
ees 572 and 652 often performed activity PTW Created before RFA
Approved during the periods of 2008–2010 and 2015–2016, while
during 2011–2014 most non-conformances were associated with
employee 677.
4.5. Process change
We applied process change detection methods to check how the
frequency of process conformance issues in the Permit to Work
system is changing over time. To learn whether the overall number
of process conformance issues is changing, we used an approach
for evaluation of the overall process risk [41] implemented as ProM
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Big Data Research 25 (2021) 100210
plug-in.5 An input to the approach is an event log that captures
information about actual process executions. Another input is a
process model that specifies the expected process behaviour. De-
viations from such process model are considered by the approach
as risky process behaviours. Examples of risky process behaviours
include skipping of an activity (e.g., an approval) or execution of
an activity by an unauthorised employee. The approach identifies
such risky process behaviours by replaying the event log on the
process model. Users can assign different costs to risky process be-
haviours (higher costs are assigned to those behaviours which are
considered more risky). The approach evaluates the overall pro-
cess risk at a given point in time or during a given time slot as
a function of costs of all risky process behaviours identified in
the process instances that were active during that time. The plug-
in extracts the overall process risk time series and visualises it.
The approach can consider different process perspectives, i.e., the
control-flow, time, organisational or data perspective. In the case
study, we only considered risky process behaviours related to the
control-flow perspective.
We used the process model and the event log that were used
for process conformance analysis and described in Section 4.2. The
costs of all risky process behaviours (i.e., deviations from the ex-
pected process flow) were set to one for all activities. We used
the mean process risk metric of the plug-in which measures the
average cost of risky process behaviours detected in all process in-
stances that were active during a given point or period of time.
5
https://github.com/a-pika/OverallProcessRiskPlugin.
A. Pika, A.H.M. ter Hofstede, R.K. Perrons et al.
Fig. 11. Number of cases in which activity PTW_created was performed by a given
employee before activity RFA_Approved for three selected employees: 572, 652, and
677.
Fig. 12. Average number of deviations from the expected process behaviour in pro-
cess instances vs. year.
The plug-in extracted quarterly values of the mean process risk for
cases started during a quarter.
As the costs of all risky process behaviours were set to one, the
mean process risk time series extracted by the plug-in (Fig. 12)
shows the average number of deviations in cases started during
different periods of time. We can observe that the average num-
ber of deviations is slightly increasing over time. For example, in
April 2008 the mean process risk value was around 0.35 (i.e., on
average a deviation happened in approximately one third of pro-
cess instances), while in August 2016 it was around 0.5 (i.e., on
average a deviation happened in every second process instance).
We also checked whether the frequencies of specific process
conformance issues are changing over time using the framework
for resource behaviour analysis implemented as ProM plug-in and
described in Section 3.3.4. We used the plug-in’s interface that al-
lows users to define their own indicators of resource or process be-
haviour and we defined measures for different types of deviations
from the expected process behaviour. For example, we defined an
indicator which counts the number of process instances started
during a given time slot in which one given activity was performed
after another given activity. The plug-in then extracted quarterly
values of this indicator for given pairs of activities from the event
log and visualised the corresponding time series. An instantiation
of this indicator for activities PTW Created and RFA Approved is de-
picted in Fig. 13.
The normative process model shown in Fig. 2 specifies that ac-
tivity PTW Created has to be performed after activity RFA Approved.
Conformance analysis helped us to identify that this was not al-
ways the case (Section 4.2); however, as we can see in Fig. 13, the
number of non-conformances with respect to this behaviour (i.e.,
the number of process instances in which activity PTW Created was
performed before RFA Approved) is slightly decreasing over time.
Although the overall number of process conformance issues is in-
creasing over time (Fig. 12), we learned that the frequency of some
process conformance issues is not changing or is decreasing (e.g.,
Fig. 13).
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Big Data Research 25 (2021) 100210
Fig. 13. An example of evolution of a process conformance issue: the number of
cases in which activity PTW_Created was performed before activity RFA_Approved
(quarterly values).
5. Conclusions
In this paper, we answered Wang and Wu’s [60] and Wang
et al.’s [61] calls for the application of Big Data science to the
safety domain by exploring the potential of applying tools and
techniques from process mining, a research area concerned with
analysing process execution data, to derive novel insights from and
improve the visualisation of safety process data. We achieved these
objectives by showcasing the potential of applying process min-
ing techniques to derive novel insights from safety data, thereby
making progress on the visualisation problem specifically identi-
fied by Wang et al. [61]. As discussed earlier, large volumes of
data are recorded in organisations with OHS MSs about the con-
duct of occupational health and safety processes and, although
this data is used extensively to produce key performance indica-
tors that measure business performance, it has failed to reveal new
insights about how, specifically, the systems can be improved to
make these workplaces safer. As a step towards improving this,
we demonstrated how process mining can be applied in a novel
way in the occupational health and safety domain. The applica-
tion of various process mining methods to data from a Permit to
Work system in an Australian company helped to uncover differ-
ent types of insights about the process. Specifically, it highlighted
process complexity and identified process performance and con-
formance issues. The findings inspired the company to consider a
process simplification initiative which could improve process safety
in the company, and brought about important outcomes for both
industry practitioners and the theoretical foundations of the safety
science research area.
5.1. Implications for industry
The application of various process mining techniques to a safety
process allowed us to explore the process behaviour from differ-
ent perspectives and yielded some unexpected findings. Process
discovery identified a surprisingly high level of complexity of the
Permit to Work system. Process performance analysis highlighted
activities in the process that contributed to long process execu-
tion times. Conformance analysis showed where in the process
deviations from the expected process behaviour frequently occur,
organisational mining helped us to identify employees associated
with these non-conformances and techniques for process change
detection discovered that the frequency of process conformance is-
sues is increasing over time. The complexity of the process could
be a factor contributing to process performance and conformance
issues. Identification of these issues is the first crucial step to-
A. Pika, A.H.M. ter Hofstede, R.K. Perrons et al.
wards improving process safety. The case study findings inspired
the company to consider a process simplification initiative.
5.2. Implications for theory
Different studies showed that OHS MSs have a positive im-
pact on the workplace safety [33]; however, it is often difficult to
evaluate such systems [46,43,5] and justify investments in them
[46,43]. Although it was argued that analysing large volumes of
data recorded by OHS MSs could help to better understand the
impact of such systems and organisational safety processes [43,53],
extracting actionable insights from safety data remains a challenge
for organisations [43,50,35]. Moreover, Ouyang et al. [35] argue
that “safety data is becoming exponentially un-analysable with tra-
ditional statistics methods” and that we need to rethink “how to
exploit the vast values of safety data efficiently.” A large and grow-
ing chorus of voices has grown within the safety literature (e.g.,
[22,3]) that is drawing attention to the increasing prevalence of
large data sets within this research discipline. And as the research
discipline becomes more data-rich and data-intensive, the research
community in this area is also experimenting with new techniques
and analytical approaches (e.g., [26]). This paper is similarly in-
tended to open up new analytical tools and methodological lenses
by considering an analytical approach that has helped to yield new
insights in a broad range of other research disciplines.
The main contribution of this article is an introduction of the
application of techniques and tools from the field of process min-
ing in the occupational health and safety domain. We used as an
example the Permit to Work process implemented in an Australian
energy company and demonstrated different types of process min-
ing analyses that can be performed on the process execution data
and different types of insights they can yield. We showed how
process mining can help to uncover actual process behaviour, can
pinpoint where the discrepancies between the expected and the
actual behaviour occur and which employees are associated with
the deviations, can identify bottlenecks in the process and show
how the process behaviour is evolving. Understanding how OHS
processes are executed in real life could make the evaluation of
OHS MSs and organisational safety culture less challenging, while
locating specific process issues (such as non-conformances or bot-
tlenecks) and employees associated with these issues can provide
clues for improving the processes and the workplace safety in or-
ganisations.
We see this foray into applying process mining into the occu-
pational health and safety domain as a first-cut attempt to bring
together two research disciplines that had not been properly con-
nected before. It therefore follows that we recognise that future
attempts to bridge these two research areas could be done bet-
ter or, at a minimum, differently. Nonetheless, it is our hope that
this paper will be a catalyst for further research at the interface
between these two domains.
5.3. Limitations and recommendations for future research
Our chosen methodology for this investigation does open up a
potential weakness in this contribution: to what degree can the
findings presented here be reasonably extended to other organisa-
tions and industries? Is the case so unique that it is unlikely that
the observations made here would be usefully relevant in other
scenarios? Two aspects of the case study make a compelling case
for believing that the evidence presented in this investigation can
shed a useful amount of light on data-related challenges for OHS
MSs in other sectors and contexts. First, as discussed in Section 3,
the organisation is most appropriately categorised as a “mid-cap”
company that is significantly smaller than more internationally
recognisable global brands within the energy industry. Unlike the
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Big Data Research 25 (2021) 100210
largest companies in the energy sector—like, for example, the oil
& gas supermajors [18]—there are thousands of companies around
the world that both fulfil the definition of a “mid-cap” and have
OHS systems (e.g., [20,15]). The findings presented here are not so
case-specific that it would be difficult to apply the essential learn-
ings from this investigation to those other contexts.
Second, it is important to remember that the overarching aim
of this paper was to apply process mining in the safety do-
main. This essentially entailed the experimental integration of lit-
erature and methodological techniques from the safety literature
with literature and tools from the process domain area to see
if, when brought together, they could yield valuable new insights
that had remained less visible beforehand. In doing so, our largest
objective with this investigation was to make a methodological
contribution—specifically, to open up new, untested possibilities for
novel explorations at the boundary between these two research
disciplines. There may not have been much potential complemen-
tarity between these two communities in the past but, with the
emergence of ever larger OHS MS data repositories, we submit that
this kind of collaboration now makes sense not only in organisa-
tions that closely resemble the one at centre of our case study, but
in lots of other organisations as well. It is our hope that this in-
vestigation will act as a catalyst that leads to more research at this
particularly fertile intersection of research domains.
Also, the types of process mining analyses we performed during
the case study were tailored to the characteristics of the process
execution data available to us. Richer event logs would allow us
to perform more sophisticated analyses. For example, the availabil-
ity of start events in the process execution data would allow us to
analyse service and waiting times. Nevertheless, we showed that
the availability of only basic attributes that are typically required
by process mining tools (i.e., process instance identifiers, activi-
ties, timestamps and resource information) enables the discovery
of helpful insights in the safety domain.
Process mining tools used during the case study allowed us to
analyse different aspects of the safety process (i.e., to consider the
overall process, specific process behaviours, behaviours of employ-
ees handling the process and changes to the process) and helped
us to uncover process conformance and performance issues, but
the underlying causes of these issues were not investigated. A di-
rection for future work is the application of tools that could help
to identify the sources of the process issues, e.g., the use of an ap-
proach for root cause analysis [52]. And while this paper sought
to improve the resolving power with which PTW systems can be
analysed, it falls short of explaining exactly why they do or do
not work, or how they might be improved. We accordingly sug-
gest that, with the benefit of Big Data analytical tools like the
ones explored in this paper, future investigations would do well
to address these important questions. Another direction for future
work is an investigation of the ways to improve the safety pro-
cess, e.g., by simplifying the process (considered by the case study
company). This could help to improve the process performance
and reduce the number of process conformance issues. One could
also investigate whether improving the process representation and
communication could lead to a decrease in the number of confor-
mance issues.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to
influence the work reported in this paper.
A. Pika, A.H.M. ter Hofstede, R.K. Perrons et al.
Acknowledgements
In this article, we use some examples from a case study con-
ducted in an Australian company, including one example described
in our earlier work [40]. The case study was funded by the Asset
Institute. We would like to thank Professor Joseph Mathew from
the Asset Institute for his support for the project and to the many
team members at the case study company who generously gave
their time and patience so that we could improve our understand-
ing of their organisation and its safety systems.
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