Process Mining – An Enabler of Digital Transformation
Digital transformation initiatives have been a crucial imperative of corporate strategy all across the globe for quite some time now. The ever-changing global markets and fierce competition has forced organizations to look inwards for opportunities to reduce costs and compete on efficiency rather than throwing money at new projects. But with the Covid-19 pandemic, every CEO on the planet has been further pushed into a frenzy to accelerate their digital journey at unprecedented speed. But most organizations are still struggling to get desirable outcomes with respect to attaining increased efficiency, ROI, and bringing digital initiatives to scale. According to a recent survey, only about 30% of organizations are able to achieve success with their digital transformation initiatives.
This is because most organizations forget that even the best technology will be rendered useless if they don’t have the right processes, culture, or talent in place to make proper use of it. This is where process mining comes into the picture. At a high level, process mining technology uses event logs from IT systems of organizations like legacy ERP or CRM systems and creates a rich visual representation in the form of process graphs that depicts a specific as-is business process. A company can analyze a given process and present to users the actual way the processes work. Further with process mining, you can also check the conformance of predefined process models and also enhance these models. According to recent research, the market for process mining is expected to grow to an estimated USD 1.4 billion by 2023. Let us see the various ways in which process mining can enable digital transformation for an organization.
- Spotting opportunities for automation
- Act on facts
- Activate the transformation in “Digital Transformation”
- Make Business Process Management efficient
- Achieve business operations agility
- Build a Digital Twin of Organization (DTO)
- Strategic RPA implementations
The main benefit of process mining is that it gives you a real and real-time visual representation of how your processes are actually operating. This makes it easy to spot bottlenecks and opportunities to make your processes more efficient. It also helps spot repeatable manual activities within the process that can be automated.
With the help of process mining technology, you can make data-driven decisions about your business rather than based on assumptions. Since process mining collects raw data from event logs as things happen it gives you access to data that other tools don’t. Process mining tools also include data visualization tools that streamline all the data and put data in context.
The crucial part of digital transformation is not “digital” but “transformation”. A successful transformation requires a change in mindset, culture, and talent. The best way to create a lasting culture is to unite your employees around a shared purpose i.e., transparency and honesty. And process mining can help you achieve that. You can share the actual process execution with relevant stakeholders: those in charge of digital transformation or those managing important processes. With help of such transparency and shared objectives, different teams can come together and unlock more areas of process improvement. Process mining also helps you to clearly demonstrate to individuals and teams the value of the work they do.
Organizations use business process management (BPM) techniques to create the most desirable processes for digital transformation. BPM focuses on designing, modeling, executing, monitoring, and optimizing a process in order to keep it steady and controlled. Optimization of business processes is a critical goal of digital transformation. Traditionally in BPM, process discovery is carried out manually through workshops and interviews which can contain inaccuracies in the true process’s depiction. But with help of process mining, the process discovery can be completely automated and the company’s real processes can be found quickly.
Digital transformation initiatives should increase the agility of businesses and process mining can help with that too. With help of predictive analytics, process mining can predict the time and outcomes of ongoing cases by analyzing historical data. Predictive process mining enables the discovery of potential issues and helps businesses to mitigate risks before any harm is done. With help of process mining, you can use insights for continuous monitoring and improvement as well. These further increase organizational agility.
A digital twin of an organization (DTO) is a virtual model of an actual process synced for real-time adaptability. DTO enables companies to run numerous what-if scenarios and make optimal decisions. It can also provide insights that can help prevent downtime, discover new opportunities, and help plan for the future. Process mining can act as an enabler for building DTO. Process mining uses data directly from your operational systems and hence provides the data connection part to DTO.
RPA or Robotic Process Automation is one of the best technologies to help implement digital transformation across an organization. With help of process graphs and analysis created by process mining tools, you can identify tasks that are suitable for RPA implementations. RPA is generally being implemented to automate laborious, time-consuming, and high-volume activities. RPA works based on a set of defined rules. And if your processes have too many variations your RPA implementation can tend to fail. Hence it is important to optimize your business processes before implementing RPA and process mining can help with that.
Consumers nowadays are looking for flexibility and responsiveness from businesses through various digital channels. It is no longer enough to just have the best product on the market. That means an organization’s processes are rapidly becoming a key differentiator. The scalability of process mining makes it an appropriate solution no matter the size of your enterprise and it has the necessary capabilities to propel your digital transformation initiatives.
