Inefficiencies become common as business processes expand and grow more complex. Determining the root causes of these inefficiencies without the help of specialists becomes increasingly difficult as the number of stakeholders, teams, and touchpoints involved in those processes increases. Enterprises across industries have used business intelligence and insight tools to help tackle this challenge. BI tools can help teams see the impact of these inefficiencies on their KPIs. But merely knowing that there is a problem and being able to tackle that problem effectively are two very different things.
This is where process mining comes in and provides valuable information on where the inefficiency is coming from, identifies root causes, and impacts the parties and other processes involved.
The process mining software is designed to discover, monitor, and help improve actual processes by analyzing event logs available in information systems. It visualizes existing approaches based on event data available in information systems, providing fact-based visibility to spot bottlenecks and avoidable delays occurring due to manual inefficiencies. Process mining will allow us to improve visibility and understanding of the actual performance of business processes and make decisions based on facts and not subjective opinions.
Eliminating inefficiencies in the Source to Pay function enables more robust cash flow, better supplier relationships, and competitive pricing. Process Mining can deliver much value for the Source to Pay function, helping to optimize spending and freeing up working capital.
Finding Automation Opportunities
Process Mining helps source pay teams understand where automation could be applied to improve results. Additionally, it helps teams see the potential impacts of proposed P2P automation to prioritize them intelligently. Process Mining also enables you to monitor the effect of this automation on KPIs, ensuring the teams are headed in the right direction. Conversely, Process Mining also helps teams understand the process areas that should not be automated. Identifying processes that need improvements can help prevent cases where teams unknowingly automate inefficiency.
Working Capital Optimization
Financial operations can be optimized in multiple ways, like improving receivables, reducing early payments, maximizing cash discounts, etc. If an organization’s working capital requirements are too high, it can miss out on acquisition or capital opportunities, not to mention the poor shareholder satisfaction with a less than an optimal balance sheet. Process Mining can help find the most accessible places to fix that would have the most significant business impact.
Better Working Relationships
Process Mining also helps improve system visibility significantly and enables smoother communication among departments. Each stakeholder can better communicate their needs and understand the challenges their colleagues face in the presence of process visualization and by removing inefficient steps.
Process Mining technology is quickly becoming the new standard for operational intelligence, providing enterprises with a reliable, actionable view of their as-is processes.
Process Mining helps organizations build a complete view of Purchase-to-Pay processes, showing them where their most significant performance and execution gaps are, and fixing these gaps can yield enormous benefits for enterprises.