Shelf Time Analysis in CTP Insurance Claims Processing

Shelf time (idle time that exceeds acceptable duration) can contribute (significantly) to overall process execution time. In this paper we describe a process mining-based approach to shelf time analysis. The technique takes as input an event log extracted from historical executions of a business process and requires each event have timestamp attributes representing both the start and completion times of each event. The essence of our shelf time identification technique is finding events which do not temporally overlap other events in the same case in the log. The major contributions of this paper include (i) an approach for identifying and quantifying periods of shelf time in an event log triggered by an event activity, (ii) an analysis of a portfolio of claims of commercial CTP insurer to identify shelf time periods and triggering activities and (iii) a discussion of an extension of the approach to include identification of shelf time periods associated with other event attributes, e. g. the resource. The technique was applied to a real life log extracted from a Queensland CTP insurer and was able to identify activities that triggered shelf time periods and to quantify the pervasiveness of shelf time across activities and cases in the log.