Utilizing Process Mining in the Development of Pharmaceutical Supply Process – Case VSSHP

Abstract

The use of process mining in supply chain management has gained increasing attention in recent years due to its potential to provide detailed and data-driven information about key processes of organization by capturing information from enterprise transaction systems. With process mining it is possible to baseline current process performance, identify areas to improve and enable process development.

In this master's thesis, the possibility of utilizing process mining in hospital pharmacy in Hospital District of Southwest Finland (VSSHP) was explored through a pilot study. The goal was to test how process mining could be used in the development of the supply process.

Overall, this master's thesis contributes to the growing body of literature on the use of process mining in supply chain management, and especially highlights the potential of process mining to improve the efficiency of pharmaceutical supply processes. In general, there has not been many previous process mining studies related to pharmaceutical supply processes. Therefore, this study was carried out as explanatory case study because this research sought to generate new understanding inductively rather than proving a theory or hypothesis.

In this study the theoretical background is first built in the literature review, where relevant disciplines and key elements of process mining are introduced. In the empirical section actual steps of process mining and the results are presented. Process mining was executed with software called Celonis.

The results of the pilot study demonstrates that it was possible to perform process mining in hospital pharmacy of TYKS. The provided data covered half of the supply process, so the results include only activities between hospital pharmacy and departments. For that process part it was possible to provide an accurate and objective picture of the process, its associated metrics (e.g., throughout times and volumes), and visualizations of all the different process variants, i.e., all the different ways in which the process was actually carried out.

By identifying and addressing bottlenecks and inefficiencies, the supply process could be streamlined, and the risk of errors could be reduced, ultimately leading to decreasing the amount of pharmaceutical waste. Therefore, process development with process mining could be possible in the hospital pharmacy but it should be validated with more comprehensive data where the whole end-to-end process would be visible.