Quantitative Process Analysis

Qualitative analysis is a valuable tool to gain systematic insights into a process. However, the results obtained from qualitative analysis are sometimes not detailed enough to provide a solid basis for decision making. Think of the process owner of BuildIT’s equipment rental process wanting to make a case to the company’s COO that every site engineer should be given a tablet computer with wireless access in order to query suppliers’ catalogs and to make and modify rental requests from any construction site. The process owner will be asked to substantiate this investment in quantitative terms and specifically to estimate how much time and money would be saved by doing this investment. To make such estimates, we need to go beyond qualitative analysis.

This chapter introduces a range of techniques for analyzing business processes quantitatively, in terms of performance measures such as cycle time, total waiting time and cost. Specifically, the chapter focuses on three techniques: flow analysis, queueing analysis and simulation. All these techniques have in common that they allow us to calculate performance measures of a process, given data about the performance of individual activities and resources in the process.