Visualizing User Action Data to Discover Business Process

Visualizing business process from data retrieved from a computer is effective to accurately and thoroughly understand how everyday processes are executed. However, it is difficult for analyzers who have knowledge in their operational fields but do not have skills in performing BPM using data to understand a process using existing visualization tools which display information with text data. Moreover, the granularity of the visualization result does not always match their analytical purpose. This paper proposes a visualization tool that visualizes a process of user actions using images and enables users to modify the visualization granularity directly on the visualization display. For evaluation, we collected real business operation data from multiple users and asked an analyzer to perform a task to find operational improvements. We discovered that it was noticeably easy for analyzers who have knowledge in their business operation to understand the whole process from the visualization result and to change visualization granularity to match their analytical purposes.