Process Mining

1. What is Process Mining?

 Like a human body that is subjected to X-rays or a cell under a microscope, imagine that you can comb through the operation of your business. Process Mining makes it possible to examine a company’s processes in a factual and thorough way, based on data from information systems.

What’s the good news? Once your processes are equipped (e.g. ERP, CRM, inventory management tool, orders, payments, etc.), they leave traces in your information systems. These traces are called logs. This is where Process Mining can be of great help. By analyzing your processes in a transparent, dynamic and real-time way, Process Mining allows you to understand how your processes actually work. However, this can deviate greatly from what you originally imagined, on the one hand because there is often a significant delta between the theoretical process and its actual application. On the other hand, because over time, processes can move away from their initial trajectory, especially as the objects (customers, payments, transactions, purchases, etc.) on which they are applied change (e.g. as the business grows, geographic areas change, or new regulatory implications).

While you believe your processes are working optimally, Process Mining highlights inefficiencies, deviations, or bottlenecks.

2. What are the benefits?

Because it offers a comprehensive, honest and dynamic view of your business processes, Process Mining has many advantages.

In other words, Process Mining allows you to see optimization opportunities in your business processes: you identify gaps, understand where they come from, and measure the impact of gaps on your business.

Here are the 4 main reasons why you should consider a Process Mining Operational Excellence Tool:

1. Visibility - through real-time modeling, you give your teams complete and dynamic visibility into how business processes work.
2. Impact measurement - deviations, inefficiencies or bottlenecks become visible and can therefore be corrected. If you know how to measure the impact of these gaps on your processes, and therefore your performance, then you have elements to measure the potential gains following their corrections.
3. Prioritization - based on your IS data, the feedback is transparent and the impacts are measurable. Your decision-making is factual, you involve stakeholders and you can prioritize corrections based on performance impacts.
4. Continuous improvement - since the feedback is done in real time, you engage in a continuous improvement process, including the implementation of alerts on identified deviations.

In other words, you are part of a virtuous circle, from modeling to process optimization, all at the service of your performance.