Digital technologies have made the line of visibility more transparent, enabling customers to get deeper insights into an organization’s core operations than ever before. This creates new challenges for organizations trying to consistently deliver high-quality customer experiences. In this paper we conduct an empirical analysis of customers’ preferences and their willingness-to-pay for different degrees of process transparency, using the example of digitally-enabled business-to-customer delivery services. Applying conjoint analysis, we quantify customers’ preferences and willingness-to-pay for different service attributes and levels. Our contributions are two-fold: For research, we provide empirical measurements of customers’ preferences and their willingness-to-pay for process transparency, suggesting that more is not always better. Additionally, we provide a blueprint of how conjoint analysis can be applied to study design decisions regarding changing an organization’s digital line of visibility. For practice, our findings enable service managers to make decisions about process transparency and establishing different levels of service quality.

Existing process mining methods are primarily designed for processes that have reached a high degree of digitalization and standardization. In contrast, the literature has only begun to discuss how process mining can be applied to knowledge-intensive processes—such as product innovation processes—that involve creative activities, require organizational flexibility, depend on single actors’ decision autonomy, and target process-external goals such as customer satisfaction. Due to these differences, existing Process Mining methods cannot be applied out-of-the-box to analyze knowledge-intensive processes. In this paper, we employ Action Design Research (ADR) to design and evaluate a process mining approach for knowledge-intensive processes. More specifically, we draw on the two processes of product innovation and engineer-to-order in manufacturing contexts. We collected data from 27 interviews and conducted 49 workshops to evaluate our IT artifact at different stages in the ADR process. From a theoretical perspective, we contribute five design principles and a conceptual artifact that prescribe how process mining ought to be designed for knowledge-intensive processes in manufacturing. From a managerial perspective, we demonstrate how enacting these principles enables their application in practice.