Happy path
The happy path is the variant of a process in which everything goes as intended, no exceptions, no rework, no manual interventions. In process mining, the happy path is usually the most frequent variant by case count; surprisingly often, it accounts for less than half of cases.
The happy path is the variant the team thinks the process follows. The non-happy paths, exception handling, rework, manual workarounds, are where most operational pain hides. The discipline is to measure the happy-path share explicitly: a process where 80% of cases follow the happy path is healthy; a process where 30% follow it has significant operational drag and is a candidate for redesign. The redesign question is rarely 'how do we make the happy path faster?' (it's usually fast enough); it's 'how do we eliminate the conditions that produce non-happy variants?'.