What is Process Mining?
Before we can define process mining, we should define what is a process: A process is a sequence of actions or steps taken to achieve a desired outcome. Business process management (BPM) tools execute the tasks in the sequence based on specific rules or conditions. A BPM tool typically automates processes to orchestrate various activities, data transfers, and decision points to achieve a business outcome or free employees from repetitive tasks.
Every high-value enterprise applies technology to drive better outcomes—whether for customer service, inventory management, risk and compliance, or any other process.
Process mining is a technique for discovering, monitoring, and improving processes. It’s an objective way to visualize how business processes work that enables end-to-end process optimization, uncovers automation potential, and delivers continuous process improvement.
The goal of process mining is to make business processes more transparent and efficient for better decision making and improved operational performance.
How process mining works
With process mining, you can gain end-to-end process visibility much more efficiently and accurately. Process mining tools gather and interpret your process data and present it in a visual format that makes it easy to quickly identify the areas that need attention. Watch a brief explainer video:
Process mining works by analyzing event logs, which are digital records of each activity executed within a process. Event logs include information about the activity, such as a description, a timestamp of when the activity took place, and an ID number that’s unique to the specific process.
Examples of event log activities include scanning the barcode of a package in transit, entering patient test results in a hospital portal, or receiving an incoming call at a call center. Event log data is run through a process mining tool and presented in a visualization resembling a flowchart, which clearly shows the entire process, including any skipped or added process steps or paths. This makes it easy to see the potential problem areas—for example, where overly long processing or idle time slows the process or where deviations from the ideal process could be causing compliance issues.
Process mining makes it easier for you to discover and eradicate the inefficiencies that negatively impact your business. And once you’ve taken steps to eliminate inefficiencies, process mining can gauge the success of your efforts and monitor for additional optimization opportunities.
Find and fix problems, monitor workflows, and continuously improve
There are several process mining techniques—each focused on different aspects of defining and optimizing processes. The best process mining tool will combine all these capabilities to provide businesses with end-to-end process visibility and control.
- Process discovery extracts process models from event logs to visualize business processes and their variants and show how each case moves through the process. Process discovery is the foundational step for identifying inefficiencies, exceptions, and bottlenecks in your process.
- Conformance checking identifies non-conformances in a process by comparing the actual process behavior with a target model. This helps businesses uncover non-compliant activities, areas for improvement, and automation opportunities. Advanced process mining technology can even auto-generate target models that can then be modified based on business goals and compliance requirements.
- Process enhancement provides decision makers with information that helps them understand their operations better and drive continuous improvement. Process enhancement tools include machine learning algorithms, KPIs, and dashboards to conduct root cause analysis, monitor the ongoing performance of an operation, and ultimately enhance the process model.
Benefits of process mining
Process inefficiency costs money, wastes time, diminishes work quality, and increases risk. With an objective view of how processes run, process mining can uncover bottlenecks and delays to save time and reduce costs.
Businesses that use process mining benefit from:
- Insights into true operational performance
- A complete view of customer and employee journeys
- More informed decision making
- Improved compliance and fraud detection through continuous process monitoring
- Accelerated enterprise modernization through better use of automation
- Time and money saved through decreased process cycle times
Process mining use cases
Process mining can be used in any industry—including healthcare, manufacturing, finance, and government—to optimize processes and ensure regulatory compliance.
By combining data from sources across an organization, process mining generates insights that provide a more complete and accurate picture of how processes are actually being executed. These insights can then be used to make informed decisions and improvements to process design and execution.
Any business process in any industry can be mined, as long as it has sufficient data to support analysis. Here are some examples:
- Finance and procurement processes, such as procure-to-pay (P2P), order-to-cash (O2C), and accounts payable/receivable (AP/AR).
- Banking, financial services, and insurance processes, such as customer onboarding, risk monitoring, and fraud detection.
- Public sector processes, such as quality management, procurement, and tax administration.
- Healthcare and pharmaceutical processes, such as patient onboarding, clinical trials, and physician referrals.
- Manufacturing processes, such as production planning, inventory management, and plant maintenance.
- IT service management processes, such as incident management, system migration, and change requests.
