Automated process weakness identification based on social media posts

Henrik Leopold

The goal of this research is to address the problem of manual work in the context of process improvement and develop a technique that automatically identifies process weaknesses relating to specific events. To achieve this, the project will exploit a widely available textual resource that captures the customer’s perspective: social media posts. The core idea is to identify process-related weaknesses described in social media posts and link them to the events of an event log. In this way, it is possible to automatically determine what process weaknesses exist and to which events of the process they relate.

Process mining techniques, which reconstruct how processes are executed, can provide valuable input for process improvement initiatives but do not automatically identify concrete process weaknesses. Identifying such weaknesses still requires the extensive involvement of domain experts. At the same time, process problems experienced by customers are frequently shared on social media platforms. The goal of this project is, therefore, to address the problem of the manual work in the context of process improvement by developing techniques that automatically link process weaknesses described in social media posts to specific events from event logs, and rank the aligned weaknesses, so that they can effectively serve as input for process improvement.