Root cause analysis

What is root cause analysis?

When analyzing a business process, you may want to determine which fields are most associated with a certain outcome. This should help you to act on the root causes associated with the outcome. For example, in the Purchase-to-Pay process, you may want to analyze the influence of purchase orders that have maverick buying tags assigned.

With Root cause analysis, you can compare the influence of case properties on a certain behavior to find significant data influencers for specific process situations. A set of cases is defined based on the period filter. This selection is called Reference cases. Within this set of cases, you can select the behavior that you want to analyze. For example, cases with a certain tag. This selection is called the Selected cases. The influence of a property is based on the number of occurrences in the selected cases.

Root cause analysis dashboard

The Root cause analysis dashboard enables you to compare the influence of case properties on a set of selected cases within a reference set of cases.

Performing a root cause analysis

Follow these steps to perform a root cause analysis.

1. Use the Period filter to define the set of Reference cases.
2. Click on in the menu on the left of the dashboard.
3. Add filters to define the set of Selected cases, which are the cases you want to analyze the influence on.
4. Select the field you want to use for your analysis from the selector.

See the illustration below for an example.

Influence

For the field selected in the dashboard, the number of occurrences in the Selected cases and in the Reference cases is displayed.

When hovering over the bars in the bar chart, the Influence (%) and the Reference (%) are displayed, See the illustration below for an example.

Below is a description of the metrics.

Metric	Description
Influence (%)	The deviation of the Selected cases (%) from the Reference (%).
Selected cases (%)	Per field value, the relative frequency of the Selected cases in the set of Reference cases.
Reference (%)	The percentage of the total set of Selected cases in the total set of Reference cases.

A large deviation from the Reference (%) indicates a possible high influence on the selection.

Show significant influencers option

The Show significant influencers option enables you to zoom in by displaying the cases with a statistical significant influence. This should help you identify the cases that have the most impact in the selection. This statistical significance is computed from both the Influence (%) and the amount of cases a certain property has.