Process Mining is a perfect combination of Business Process Management, Data Mining and Technology to discover processes, check on conformance, optimise the processes, build simulations and build process dashboards. While it could be a great toolset, and it is important to understand in detail what is process mining, the other big open questions are around identifying when is the best time to look at this as a solution for your organisation and how to go about implementing it. Let us look at these in more detail.
What is Process Mining?
In any company you would have a set of systems which get used to execute a process. From a ERP to a CRM to Ticketing, etc and many more home grown pieces of product and tech. Largely it is common to have some kind of logging mechanism in most of these systems and tech.
Process Mining is a technique where you use these logs to bring about insights into how your process is being run. Of course the very basic of this technique requires a key identifier across these systems to join up the data and I would expect some work to be done to find out the linkages. Once you have the links, the mining tool would do the rest to create visual maps of your processes and the paths it takes.
It can help draw up the process (Discovery), check if it is being run as designed (Conformance), Simulate changes and give automated dashboards to help find bottlenecks etc.
Scaling your business – When to use Process Mining?
Process Mining uses Processes, Data and Technology together to bring results for your Digital Transformation journey, but it is important to know when to use it.
As a wise man said, don’t try to use a wrench when a screwdriver can do the job!
Let us first understand where does Process Mining sit in the Process Transformation journey – Process Transformation is much more than just documenting a series of steps or process, actually much more. In order to lead an effective transformation, one needs to first understand the business and cultural context of the company as this forms the underlying fabric of a good transformation.
The processes then need to be documented in a process model template. The next step is to automate these processes using an orchestration technology or robotics process automation (RPA). The automation needs enough evangelisation and change management to get adopted and become effective. These are the absolute basics of a process transformation.
Once all of the above steps are done is a good time to look at process mining to improve your transformation efforts by several notches.
If I’d to summarise process mining in 3 steps, I would say it is a Technology piece which helps bring disparate sets of data together to help you firstly understand the process, secondly analyse the process and thirdly optimise the process.
Using these 3 steps, you can find bottlenecks in your process which are slowing them down, bring the focus back on the most important tasks, create right automation charter and lead the change management.
How to choose a mining solution?
There are many process mining solutions out there in the market, Signavio (SAP company), Apromore, Minit and many more. It is important that you look at some perspectives while making a choice of the solution you want to deploy. I’m giving 3 key perspectives here which I feel are important.
The first and foremost would be the product capability which I would put as Discovery and Analytical Perspective. Here you should look to check product capabilities on discovery, conformance checking, visualisation platform, simulation, performance analysis (finding bottlenecks), delta analysis and dashboarding.
The next would be to look at Operational Perspective. Things like implementation capability, partner ecosystem, support capability, user friendliness, automation capabilities would figure in here.
The third perspective to look at would be Organisational Perspective where you look at costs, license type, fitment to your system architecture, platforms supported, cloud capabilities etc.
A Real Life Example
Let me talk about one example of implementing Process Mining. The objective of this project was to improve the end to end timeline of Procure to Pay process. In the process, we got a lot of learnings on our process itself.
The process was automated using Signavio while the budgeting and payments were done through SAP. We ran the mining on Apromore.
We started by laying down the event log structure from both Signavio and SAP and doing few data transformations for actual usage of data. These logs were given as input into the mining product leading to process discovery of various nodes and paths. Since our objective was to improve the end to end time, we looked at the bottlenecks on specific process states, we could even identify specific people causing these bottlenecks.
With this visibility we could work to optimise the process further, train the specific people, create dashboards and cadence to report and measure. Overall this led to about 40% improvement in the end to end P2P process.
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