Patent ID: 8825609

Claim:
A system for detecting wasteful data collection comprising: at least one memory that stores: logical process model information comprising: a plurality of process activities in a business process, and definitions of logical relationships between respective process activities, including definition of one or more sequences in which at least some of the respective process activities are to be performed, and data input information comprising: a plurality of data element identifiers indicative of a plurality of expected inputs, each expected input comprising an expected collection of a corresponding case-specific data element during performance of respective cases of the business process, a plurality of process activity identifiers associated with respective data element identifiers, each process activity identifier linking a respective data element identifier to a particular process activity in which the corresponding case-specific data element is to be collected; and a source type identifier associated with each data element identifier to indicate a particular type of a predefined plurality of types of sources from which an associated expected input is to be received; and a computer including: a duplication identifier module to analyze the data input information to automatically identify duplicate expected inputs, each duplicate expected input being one of the plurality of expected inputs for which there is at least one other expected input having a corresponding common data element, the duplicate expected input and the at least one other expected input being linked to different process activities of the plurality of process activities of the business process; and an efficiency calculation module configured to calculate a data collection efficiency value based at least in part on the identified duplicate expected inputs, and to allocate a duplication weight to each duplicate expected input corresponding to the associated source type identifier.