Process Mining: The Foundation for Intelligent Automation
Process mining is a method used to analyze and monitor business processes by helping enterprises to capture data from transactions and provides important insights on how business processes are performing. Process mining bridges the gap between business process modeling and data mining. A process mining tool can make use of the data stored in your enterprise information system and find out bottlenecks and provide meaningful insights into improving the process.
In the medical field, doctors use the technology of MRI (Magnetic Resource Imaging) to look through the patient’s body cells and gather the required information. This helps them visually diagnose your health. Process mining is similar as it collects all the data from the process activities like the event logs, time stamps, etc., and helps create an accurate image of the process. Enterprises can check the digital health of any process and diagnose the issues for a quick solution with the help of the visual representation provided by process mining.
Process mining can help enterprises
- Detecting Process Issues
- Prioritizing Cost-Effective Actions
- Increase Process Agility
- Enhance Customer Satisfaction
- Help to start or scale Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Process Mining Powers Automation
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. The misinterpretation of underlying nuances of any business process has led many enterprises to fail automation attempts. In order to remove bottlenecks and automate for optimization, enterprises must embrace digital transformation. Enterprises need to ensure the free flow of information, breaking down information silos. Digital tools can be of huge help in this. 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.
Some of the key capabilities of a process mining tool are:
- Real-Time KPIs Monitoring
- Process Visualization
- 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 on.
Combination with RPA
Process improvement consists of several parts: identifying the issues and opportunities, modifying the process, and monitoring changes for further optimization. While process mining is an excellent technology for problems identification, Robotic Process Automation is gaining momentum by actually changing processes that are currently being performed manually.
The union of process mining and RPA has given a start to a new technology trend – hyper automation. The combination of various process optimization and automation tools makes it easier for an organization to take full advantage of corporate data and become a self-evolving enterprise.
With complete knowledge of the process and process discovery:
- Automation becomes easier with process mining as organizations know exactly what process to automate and yield better results.
- Organizations can ensure conformance to the ideal process model and provide information when the employees are diverting from it.
- Process discovery and mining tell what the business needs for successful transformation.
- With process mining, businesses can even establish clear objectives in the initial stages to increase the stakeholder buy-in or even for facilitating their confidence.
- When you have complete knowledge of the process and each human-digital interaction, you can even improve your user experience and improve conversion rate.
Process Mining Use Cases
The good news is that process mining applies to any industry and any process. Let us look at some of the most common use cases for process mining.
Order to Cash
- Increasing on-time delivery: For customer satisfaction, on-time deliveries are essential. Companies can use process mining to uncover the reasons behind late deliveries.
- Locating key regions: With process mining, the companies can detect their high-value customers and critical areas to focus on those areas.
- Identifying root causes of order changes: Customers sometimes change their orders which causes processes to take a longer time. The unclarity of pre-order stages might cause these order changes. Companies prefer to decrease these order changes to stabilize their processes.
Accounts Payable
- Identifying root causes for incorrect invoices: Mistakes on the invoices or duplicate payments are common issues that cause extra workload. Companies can identify the reasons for these cases with process mining.
- Reducing late payments: Companies can mine their processes to uncover the reasons for their late payments. By fixing these inefficiencies, companies can diminish late payments and improve cash discounts.
Production
- Reduced cycle time: To improve the output, reducing the production cycle time is a smart solution. Process mining can show the inefficiencies within the production processes. Companies can reduce their cycle time by fixing these inefficiencies.
- Reduced rework in production: Companies can reduce their reworks by creating in-process alerts. As the manufacturing deviates from the standard, the process mining software can report to the relevant units. It provides companies to ensure better quality products, as well.
Process Mining allows companies to analyze large data sets and helps them take complete control of their organization by using smart process analysis. End-to-end visibility of how information and workflows through your business makes it easy to pinpoint where and how to make necessary improvements to uncover new margin and revenue potential. Building a business case based on this level of detail is far easier, and therefore leading digital transformation projects is much simpler.