Analysis of a Business Environment using Burstiness Parameter: The Case of a Grocery Shop

Abstract

Nowadays, bursty business processes are part of our everyday life. Bursty business processes include such processes as selling and buying, too. One of the contemporary challenges business environment has to deal with is monitoring and controlling of burstiness in business processes. Monitoring and controlling of burstiness in business processes often leads to the optimization of business processes. Validation of the model for analysing buyers’ burstiness in business processes revealed the need in optimisation of the proposed model, as the elaborated model based on gap processes is complex for implementation, as well as for parameter estimation. For optimization of the model for analysing buyers’ burstiness in business process, different levels of burstiness in the process of buying are studied in this work. Different approaches to modelling buyers’ behaviours are presented and evaluated in this work, too. The novel contribution of this work is based on the estimation of burstiness. With the proposed solution the level of burstiness can be estimated by taking the mean value and the standard deviation of a gap sequence into account, which always exists for a given sequence. As a practical application, the cash register of a medium size grocery shop in Lithuania is analysed. The novelty of this paper is given by the comparison of different approaches to measuring burstiness in real process data. Directions of further research are proposed.