What is process mining?
Process Mining is a technique where organisations gather transactional data from the activity/event logs of their (ERP) systems in order to gain an objective view of how their business processes are operating and how they could be improved (White, 2020). Process mining has been used effectively to analyse the current state of business processes, to determine areas for improvement, and to evaluate the improvement outcomes. Besides, the technique helps companies to develop an in-depth understanding of the underlying causes, as well as the effect they have on their Key Performance Indicators (Davenport and Spanyi, 2022).
Tools
There are different tools available for process mining, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Some of the most popular tools include Disco, ProM, Celonis, and SAP Signavio. With these process mining tools, organisations can shift from the confidence-based approach to Business Process Management (BPM) and progress towards the data-driven approach, basing their changes on live factual data.
Process mining tools really take advantage of the data mining concept in particular in order to find concrete answers to questions regarding any identified challenges or situations within companies. However, compared to process mining, data mining does not give a complete picture of a business process, including bottlenecks. In contrast, process mining allows business users to retrieve visual process maps and models of their processes from the company’s data and enhance those process overviews/maps and models to reveal the inefficiencies, sources of delays, rework, and defects, and other operational pain points leading to an inefficient process.
How process mining can improve business processes
Together, activity and process mining can provide a comprehensive view of the company’s processes, and help to identify opportunities for improvement, for example, on customer support, financial, HR, or supply chain processes. Using machine learning algorithms, process mining tools calculate combinations of various attributes and conduct root-cause analyses, which helps to detect operational inefficiencies. After the analysis, it can help assist in improving the business’ efficiency and can help organisations reduce costs and improve performance by identifying root causes for poor-performing processes, uncovering, and visualising compliance violations, monitoring processes, and anticipating problems. Once the improvements needed and actions needed are identified for the organisation from the results, process mining also provides the means for easy monitoring the effects of changes to the business processes (Raiola, 2021).
To conclude, by mining data from event logs of (ERP) systems, instead of using interviews and estimations, process mining uncovers where workarounds, shadow processes, bottlenecks, and compliance issues are occurring, and plays a crucial role in improving business operations and risk reduction.
Prediction
As process mining is still somewhat new and companies have difficulties understanding and identifying its value, it will not be adopted much in the coming five years, even though, there are successful use cases in which it has helped reducing resources. However, as it carries a lot of potential and more companies are starting to become data-driven and focus on their big data, I think that this methodology will be used more in the following ten years.
References
Becker, R., 2022. What is process mining and how does it work?. [online] SEEBURGER Blog. Available at: <https://blog.seeburger.com/seeburger-goes-process-mining-an-adventure-in-optimization/> [Accessed 1 October 2022].
Davenport, T. and Spanyi, A., 2022. What Process Mining Is, and Why Companies Should Do It. [online] Harvard Business Review. Available at: <https://hbr.org/2019/04/what-process-mining-is-and-why-companies-should-do-it> [Accessed 1 October 2022].
Raiola, R., 2022. How to improve business processes using process mining. [online] MEGA. Available at: <https://community.mega.com/t5/Blog-EN-Business-IT/How-to-improve-business-processes-using-process-mining/ba-p/26672> [Accessed 1 October 2022].
White, S., 2022. What is process mining? Refining business processes with data analytics. [online] CIO. Available at: <https://www.cio.com/article/193601/what-is-process-mining-refining-business-processes-with-data-analytics.html> [Accessed 1 October 2022].
