Reasons for Using Process Mining

Organizations can only reach maximum productivity and achieve significant business process changes if they understand how their workflows actually function. Humans cannot extract and analyze data quickly enough to keep their organizations competitive.

Organizations may use process mining to uncover what's happening in their processes rather than relying on assumptions. They may then discover the fundamental causes of blockages in real-time, optimize their resources, and grow with certainty and productivity.

What Exactly is Process Mining?

Process mining is a contemporary business process management technology (BPM). It exists at the nexus of data science and management science. Process mining is a collection of methodologies with a common goal: to extract process insights from information systems using units known as event logs.

The approach used by an organization for process mining is determined by the stage at which its process models are located. The three basic process mining approaches are as follows:

Process discovery is the most often used approach and also serves as a building component. The discovery process produces a process model that may be used to verify for future conformity and improvements. Process discovery may be thought of as "figuring out what's going on."

Conformance checking: Algorithms use conformance checking to identify any deviations from the intended process model results. Consider this strategy to be "finding out where we're going off the tracks." Model enhancement: Once you've completed discovery and conformance testing, you may wish to go on to process enhancement, which begins with model enhancement. This strategy may be thought of as a means to "identify possibilities to improve."

These data mining approaches work together to assist businesses in maintaining a high degree of uniformity, predictability, and continuous development. Businesses may use process mining to optimize a single process, an individual department, or an entire company.

The Importance of Process Mining

Why is process mining important? Companies that have defined and can measure their KPIs benefit from a more in-depth process analysis. They may identify flaws in their business processes and identify low-risk ways to improve them, making them more flexible and competitive in the marketplace.

Here are the features of process mining that assist businesses in achieving and maintaining this agility and competitive advantage:

Increasing business intelligence: Data-backed insights and recommended upgrades assist stakeholders in reaching consensus and making business operations choices more quickly.

Identifying obstacles in the process: Process mining assists firms in determining previously unnoticed bottlenecks, allowing them to address core causes and reclaim efficiency in common procedures.

Surfacing process deviations: Organizations understand how an organization's process can function, but with each process, there is the possibility of variations that cause workflows to deviate. Process mining reveals genuine processes, process phases, and variations. These are growth opportunities.

How Does Process Mining Work?

Process mining is the application of algorithms to proprietary log data sets from IT systems. 

Another way to look at it is that something happened (an event) at a specific moment (timestamp). Additional valuable information may be attached to the date and time. For instance, suppose someone attempts and fails to log in to a SaaS program. In addition to the event and timestamp, the log would include an incident. When combined with the analysis and visualizations provided by process mining technologies, the event log may assist create a more comprehensive picture of what occurred in a complicated transaction.

Process Mining Use Cases

Any corporation (in any industry) that implements and tracks business processes can benefit from process mining. Here are a few examples of frequent process mining applications: 

Manufacturing and distribution: The process of bringing things to market has never been more scrutinized. People's health and productivity worldwide have depended on the speed with which vaccinations and related health equipment are manufactured and distributed. Process mining has the potential to reduce bottlenecks between the numerous scattered actors, with far-reaching consequences for everybody.

Sales: Process mining can look for deviations and other inefficiencies in sales cycles. This may help organizations better manage resources and create process improvements that strengthen measures like days to closure – a benefit for B2B firms whose courses can vary from 3 to 9 months, opening up the potential for competitors to gain market share.

Finance: Procedure mining may assist finance departments to improve the efficiency of business processes such as audits by discovering deviations such as maverick buying, which is the practice of acquiring products and services outside of a formal procurement process.

Process mining in e-commerce may assist firms in better understanding how a certain customer process works in order to enhance sales and improve the customer experience. An e-commerce business, for example, may create models that immediately disclose crucial metrics such as web page connection, essential routes to buy, order-to-cash, and time to problem resolution (on the support side).

Process mining in healthcare can increase the efficiency of patient contacts as well as the efficiency and cost associated with interdepartmental processes. Shorter interactions and wait times are often helpful for both patients and healthcare professionals. It also aids the company in areas such as high-cost imaging workflows.