Throughput time and setting a target – Tekst

Throughput time is how process mining answers "how long does this take?". You can read it across the map and for the process as a whole, and you can set a target so you can track how many cases finish in time. This article explains both. For the surrounding vocabulary, see the "Activities, variants, and the process map" article.

What throughput time measures

Throughput time is measured at two levels:

Per edge - the time it typically takes to move from one activity to the next. This is what the map shows when you choose a throughput metric on the edges.
Per case (overall) - the time from a case's first step to its last. This is the end-to-end duration of the whole process.

You can view the typical time as a median (the middle value, less affected by outliers) or an average (the mean). The median is usually the better default for understanding "normal" timing, because a few very slow cases can pull the average up.

Finding slow steps

To find where time is spent, set the edge metric to a throughput time on the map and look for the transitions with the largest values. Those are the steps where cases wait longest - the natural places to focus improvement. Pair this with the Variants sidebar (ordered slowest to fastest) to see which whole routes are the most time-consuming.

Setting a throughput time target

A throughput time target is the time you want cases to finish within. Setting one lets Tekst track performance against your goal.

In the Processes list, open the row actions menu for the process and choose Set throughput time target (you can also set it from the process itself).
Enter the target as days, hours, and minutes.
Save the target.

Reading performance against the target

Once a target is set, the process shows a progress bar comparing cases that finish under the target against those that go over it. The portion within target is shown in green and the portion over target in red, with a tooltip giving the exact counts. This gives you an at-a-glance read on how often the process meets your goal, and a way to watch that number improve as you act on the slow steps you found.

Next steps

To explore the routes behind the timing, see the "Explore process variants" article.
To focus the numbers on a slice of your data, see the "Filter a process by inbox, topic, and time" article.