Process Mining- The Business Imperative
There have long been a few fundamental challenges associated with business process management. Regardless of process complexity or the end results achieved, enterprises frequently experience many of the same challenges while managing their business processes. The primary challenge that enterprises face is the creation of “current state” or as-is processes. Enterprises are primarily interested in the “to be” process, so often they neglect exploring “as is,” or how the process is currently being performed. But understanding the current process is critical to understanding the persistent performance challenges, how much process variation exists within the organization, and whether it is worth investing in improvements. Many enterprises skip current process analysis altogether or adopt shortcuts to analyze the “as is” process. On the other hand, enterprises that adopt an incremental improvement approach, tend to spend too much time analyzing the “as-is.”
The other problem with process management is the lack of connections between business processes and an organization’s enterprise information systems. Some enterprise systems are process-oriented in the sense that they support processes like procure to pay, order order-to-cash, or billing management but there is rarely an easy way to understand how the process is being executed from the information system. If information is needed on how a particular process is performing day to day, it typically involves manual, error-prone tasks to gather data.
Process Mining therefore can not only address these challenges but also help enterprises become more aware of the potential value of the data in their systems. Process mining is a technique to analyze and monitor processes.
Process mining uses existing data available in corporate information systems and automatically displays the real process as opposed to the traditional business process management, where process workshops and interviews paint the idealized picture of a process. According to a recent global survey covering organizations from 24 countries, 63% of enterprises have already started to implement process mining, and 83% of enterprises already using process mining on a global scale plan to expand their initiatives. Let us look at the reasons why an enterprise should be using process mining.
Process Visibility
Many enterprises have defined processes and written down manuals so each resource knows exactly what to do, however at the ground level, there might be deviations involved in the processes. Process mining facilitates visibility to corporate system data and therefore no task/activity escapes the eye. The technology, therefore, provides enterprises with insights that help them make the right decisions.
Performance Management Improvement
Enterprises find it difficult to accurately measure employee performance. Process Mining tools automate data collection of the process performance. KPIs such as SLA, Resolution time, etc. are continuously monitored allowing process owners to continuously improve processes.
Improve Customer Experience
Process mining tools enable constant process monitoring helping enterprises identify process bottlenecks and reacting faster. Thus, if a problem occurs, the tool can identify its cause faster and the enterprise can react promptly. Shorter reaction time improves the company’s performance and also increases customer satisfaction.
Enhanced Compliance
Auditing is a time and effort-intensive task. Process mining enables auditors to analyze data faster and also enterprises can react faster to non-compliant processes. Enterprises spend significant resources to build dashboards to track process compliance in absence of process mining. Process mining tools provide dashboards to monitor real-time compliance issues.
Process Mining as the Foundation of Digital Transformation
Enterprise processes are rapidly becoming a key differentiator. Whether it is processed like customer order processing, invoicing, quality assurance, or risk management, the workflows have never been more important. In order to remove bottlenecks and automate for optimization, enterprises must embrace digital transformation. Enterprises need to find ways to break down information silos and allow the free flow of information. Digital tools offer a solution to this problem. Digital tools also help the workforce, by freeing them of repetitive, mundane tasks that plague their overall productivity and help them engage in value-added tasks.
Process mining tools help in analy¬zing event logs and other available data to build up a graphic representation of your workflows, which assists in locating process bottlenecks and highlight duplicated areas of work.
Some of the key capabilities of a process mining tool are:
- KPIs monitoring in real-time.
- Visualization of how processes contribute to business outcomes.
- Predictive Analysis
- Process Standardization
Process mining, therefore, acts as the keystone to enterprise digital transformation initiatives. It provides important information needed to make sound business decisions. Through process mining tools, enterprises can visualize the impact on businesses when they run through the scenarios of changing the process. Enterprises subsequently can make improvements in their existing processes and also know what returns to expect from their investments. Process mining tools should be the foundation upon which all future investment and transformation projects should be based.
Process Mining Trends 2021
- Process Discovery and Mining Expanding to More Industries
- Context-Aware Process Mining
- Large Scale Process Mining
- Robotic Process Automation
Traditionally, enterprises in finance, telecommunications, and retail pioneered the process of mining usage. Enterprises within these industries focused on horizontal shared services such as order to cash (O2C), procure to pay (P2P), client acquisition, and billing management. In the near future, process mining is expanding to industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, and logistics.
Process mining, when done without context, will not yield the right insights and not deliver relevant results. Process data is a treasure for enterprises seeking a transformation. Existing process mining techniques tend to use a rather narrow context, i.e., only the instance in isolation is considered. But only with the proper context can you transform it into information that acts as valuable insight.
Top process mining thought leaders are calling for Process Mining to be approached “on a larger scale and not as a small toy project. The project must be done continuously and for many processes rather than as a pilot project doing one analysis on one process at a given time.
Process Mining acts as the predecessor to RPA which identifies tasks for automation. RPA without Process Mining will capture the low-hanging fruit —which users can identify on their own. These steps, however, may not be the most valuable in terms of automation. As businesses progress on their automation journey, they will rely more on data-nominated process steps rather than the human-nominated alternative. Process Mining reveals the connections between systems and stages of which human users may not be aware, enabling the technology to have the best insight into areas ripe for automation.
Building your technology roadmap and taking the business from visibility to transformation is simplified by process mining. Enhance visibility into data and workflows makes it easy to identify where and how to make necessary improvements to uncover new margin and revenue potential.