Analyzing the Devil’s Quadrangle of Process Instances Through Process Mining

The Devil’s Quadrangle is a framework used in Business Process Management to describe the inherent process performance trade-offs regarding the time, costs, flexibility, and quality dimensions. In practice, improving a process through one of these dimensions might have a negative effect on the performance of the other dimensions. The dimensions considered by the Devil’s Quadrangle are often used for defining indicators that illustrate the overall performance of processes. From a Process Mining perspective, analyzing these dimensions at higher granularity levels, such as for every process instance, is of interest. To achieve this, this work proposes a method for defining Process Mining filters based on metrics related to performance indicators of the four Devil’s Quadrangle dimensions. The metrics are calculated for every process instance, which allows using the filters to observe differences in process behavior while considering constraints to the performance indicators and trade-offs among the four dimensions. It is expected that this visualization will be helpful during exploratory process analysis. It will facilitate the identification of process instances that conform to the filters applied to the performance indicators, as well as the dimensions where improvement is required while considering process instances that do not conform to the applied filters. A Celonis dashboard with the proposed filters has been generated to validate the method.