Overview
The Events Before or After Activity filter selects or removes events based on their position relative to specific activities within each case. This powerful event-level filter allows you to focus on portions of your process by keeping only events that occur before, after, or between specified activities. You can analyze process segments, identify patterns in specific workflow stages, or remove irrelevant events that fall outside your area of interest.
Common Uses
- Analyze events that occur before a critical milestone or decision point
- Focus on activities that happen after a specific process stage
- Extract process segments between two key activities
- Remove preliminary events to focus on core processing activities
- Identify patterns in post-approval or post-rejection workflows
- Study process behavior between start and end milestones
Settings
Activity Name: The primary activity that serves as your reference point or boundary.
Activity Name 2: (For Between operations only) The second activity that defines the end boundary.
Before/After Selection: Choose the filtering mode that determines which events to keep or remove.
| Mode | Description | Example Use |
|---|---|---|
| Before | Events before the first occurrence of Activity | Analyze activities leading up to first approval |
| Before and Including | Events before and including first occurrence | Include approval in pre-approval analysis |
| After | Events after the last occurrence of Activity | Study post-completion follow-up activities |
| After and Including | Events after and including last occurrence | Include completion in post-completion analysis |
| Between | Events between first occurrence of two activities | Analyze processing between submission and approval |
| Between and Including | Events between and including both activities | Include boundaries in segment analysis |
Remove Events: Choose whether to keep the matching events or remove them.
- Keep (false): Returns only events that match the criteria
- Remove (true): Removes events that match the criteria, keeping everything else
Examples
Example 1: Analyzing Pre-Approval Activities
Scenario: You want to analyze all activities that occur before the first "Manager Approval" in your expense claim process to understand what preparation work happens before claims reach approval.
Settings:
- Activity Name: "Manager Approval"
- Before/After Selection: Before (not including)
- Remove Events: Keep (false)
Result:
For each case, only events occurring before the first "Manager Approval" are retained. Case #EXP-1234 might show "Submit Claim," "Attach Receipts," "Department Review," but not "Manager Approval" or anything after it. This lets you analyze the submission and preparation phase separately.
Insights: By isolating pre-approval activities, you can measure preparation time, identify bottlenecks in document collection, and understand which activities consistently precede approval. This helps optimize the submission phase of your workflow.
Example 2: Studying Post-Rejection Activities
Scenario: When loan applications are rejected, you want to analyze what happens afterward - whether customers reapply, request appeals, or abandon the process. You need to focus only on events after the "Application Rejected" activity.
Settings:
- Activity Name: "Application Rejected"
- Before/After Selection: After (not including)
- Remove Events: Keep (false)
Result:
For each rejected case, only events occurring after the last "Application Rejected" are kept. Case #LOAN-5678 might show "Appeal Requested," "Additional Documents," "Manager Review," but not the rejection event itself or anything before it. This isolates the post-rejection workflow.
Insights: This reveals customer behavior after rejection and identifies opportunities for process improvement. You can measure how many customers reapply, how long they wait before appealing, and whether certain rejection types lead to more appeals.
Example 3: Analyzing Processing Between Activities
Scenario: Your insurance claim process has a clear processing window between "Initial Assessment" and "Final Decision." You want to analyze only the activities that occur during this core processing phase, excluding preliminary and follow-up activities.
Settings:
- Activity Name: "Initial Assessment"
- Activity Name 2: "Final Decision"
- Before/After Selection: Between (not including)
- Remove Events: Keep (false)
Result:
For each case, only events between the first "Initial Assessment" and first "Final Decision" are retained, excluding both boundary activities. Case #CLM-9876 might show "Document Verification," "Expert Consultation," "Additional Information Request," but not the assessment or decision themselves.
Insights: This isolates your core claims processing activities, allowing you to measure processing efficiency, identify common investigation steps, and analyze bottlenecks in the evaluation phase without noise from preliminary or post-decision activities.
Example 4: Removing Post-Completion Activities
Scenario: Your order fulfillment analysis should focus only on activities up to and including delivery. Events after "Delivered" like "Customer Survey" and "Feedback Collected" are important but should be excluded from fulfillment cycle time analysis.
Settings:
- Activity Name: "Delivered"
- Before/After Selection: After and Including (Delivered)
- Remove Events: Remove (true)
Result:
For each case, the "Delivered" event and everything after it are removed, keeping only the fulfillment activities. Case #ORD-4567 retains "Order Received," "Payment Processed," "Shipped" but removes "Delivered," "Survey Sent," and "Feedback Received."
Insights: By removing post-delivery activities, your cycle time calculations reflect actual fulfillment duration without including customer feedback collection. This provides accurate operational metrics while you can analyze feedback activities separately using a different filter configuration.
Example 5: Complete Workflow Segment Analysis
Scenario: You want to analyze the complete approval workflow including both the "Approval Request Submitted" start point and "Final Approval Decision" end point, excluding everything outside this segment.
Settings:
- Activity Name: "Approval Request Submitted"
- Activity Name 2: "Final Approval Decision"
- Before/After Selection: Between and Including
- Remove Events: Keep (false)
Result:
For each case, events from the first "Approval Request Submitted" through the first "Final Approval Decision" are retained, including both boundary activities. This gives you the complete approval segment with clear start and end points.
Insights: Including both boundaries gives you complete approval workflow metrics including the activities that mark the beginning and end of the approval process. This is ideal for measuring total approval duration and analyzing the complete sequence of approval-related activities.
Output
This filter operates at the event level and can significantly reshape your process log:
- Before/After modes: Find the first (Before) or last (After) occurrence of the specified activity
- Between modes: Find events between the first occurrence of Activity Name and Activity Name 2
- Remove mode: Inverts the selection (removes matching events instead of keeping them)
- Cases remain in the dataset even if events are removed
- Empty cases may result if all events are filtered out
- Event sequences and attributes are preserved for retained events
Use this filter to focus your analysis on specific process segments, understand behavior patterns before or after key milestones, or remove irrelevant events that fall outside your area of interest.
This documentation is part of the mindzie Studio process mining platform.