Dynamic human resource selection for business process exceptions

Abstract

A key capability of today's organizations is to flexibly and effectively react to unexpected events. A critical case of an unexpected event is sudden unavailability of human resources, which was not properly addressed by existing resource allocation approaches. This paper proposes a systematic approach that analyzes event logs to select suitable substitutes if the initial human resources become unavailable. The approach uses process mining and social network analysis to derive a metric called degree of substitution, which measures how much the work experiences of the human resources overlap, from the two perspectives: task execution and transfer of work. Along with the metric, suitable substitutes are also identified. A simulation demonstrates that the approach identifies suitable substitutes more effectively and accurately than existing allocation methods such as role-based allocation or random allocation. The proposed approach will increase the effectiveness of dynamic allocation of human resources, especially in an exceptional situation.

Automatic Resource Allocation in Business Processes: A Systematic Literature Survey

“…Ten studies consider attributes belonging to the expertise category [2,15,28,32,38,42,47,63,68,69]. We found that amount [16,51,60,61] and social context [34,36,47,69] are considered less often (4 studies each). Experience is considered only by Zhao et al [69] and preference only by Huang et al [28].…”

“…Eleven primary studies use them for preparation and five of them as input to the resource allocation technique directly. Eight out of the eleven studies in the former class employ the process data to identify some insights on resources of the process (i.e., characteristics of resources), e.g., their previous performance [2,26,36,70], their expertise [2,5,38], their workload [2,5,70], their team compatibility [34],…”

“…or their social context [36]. Other studies identify characteristics of tasks during preparation for resource allocation, such as similarity between tasks [66] or misallocations of tasks in the past [6].…”

“…As shown in Figure 9, rule-based approaches mostly concentrate on finding the best-fitting resource for a task [5,20,26,35,36,42,47]. Furthermore, rule-based approaches support minimizing the cycle time of processes [22,59,63] , balancing the workload [21,65], minimizing the process cost [62], or prioritizing tasks [4].…”

Improving business processes or human resources? The performance implications and contingencies

“…Employees are business process executors. When tasks are assigned to them in a “pull or push” mechanism, it often leads to inappropriate task assignment (such as too many/few tasks, unqualified or overloaded employees) and low process efficiency (Lee et al , 2019). BPI is typically “the result of many individual efforts from front-line production workers, to industrial engineers, and teams of individuals at both the line and staff level” (Bennett and Levinthal, 2017, p. 2,009).…”