Identifying Process Improvement Opportunities through Process Execution Benchmarking

Benchmarking functionalities in current commercial process mining tools allow organizations to contextualize their process performance through high-level performance indicators, such as completion rate or throughput time. However, they do not suggest any measures to close potential performance gaps. To address this limitation, we propose a prescriptive technique for process execution benchmarking that recommends targeted process changes to improve process performance. The technique compares an event log from an ``own'' process to one from a selected benchmark process to identify potential activity replacements, based on behavioral similarity. It then evaluates each proposed change in terms of its feasibility and its estimated performance impact. The result is a list of potential process modifications that can serve as evidence-based decision support for process improvement initiatives.