Business Process Mining vs. Data Mining: 3 Key differences

Business process mining is  a technique that enables organizations to monitor, analyze and improve their business processes through event logs. Through automated process discovery, organizations can visualize “as-is” process model and establish a fact-based understanding of the process workflow.

On the other hand, data mining is the process of discovering patterns in data using advanced machine learning algorithms.

Business process mining and data mining are two distinct techniques, each with its own unique set of benefits and use cases.

This blog will discuss the key differences between business process mining and data mining and explore how these techniques can be leveraged to drive business growth.

Learn More: What is Business Process Mining?

What is Business Process Mining?

Business process mining is a technique that involves analyzing and visualizing complex business processes to identify inefficiencies and areas for improvement. It provides a comprehensive view of the underlying processes and workflows that drive business operations, allowing organizations to uncover automation opportunities and streamline their operations.

At its core, business process mining involves analyzing event logs, which capture data about the various tasks and activities within a process. By analyzing this data, businesses can gain insights into the performance of their processes, identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies, and identify processes to automate.

Learn More: What is Process Mining?

What is Data Mining?

Data mining is the process of discovering patterns and mining key information from large data sets using advanced machine learning algorithms. Gartner defines it as the “process of discovering meaningful correlations, patterns, and trends by sifting through large amounts of data stored in repositories; [it] employs pattern recognition technologies, as well as statistical and mathematical techniques.”

These patterns can be used to predict future trends, identify growth opportunities, and inform business strategy.

By uncovering patterns within data, businesses can gain insights into customer behavior, identify new revenue opportunities, and improve their marketing efforts. Additionally, data mining can help organizations to reduce costs by identifying inefficiencies within their operations.

Learn More: What is Data Mining?

3 Differences between Business Process Mining and Data Mining

• Business process mining involves analyzing event logs, which capture data about various tasks and activities within a process. This data typically includes information about time, duration, and outcome of tasks. On the other hand, data mining involves analyzing large data sets, which can include a wide variety of data types, such as customer demographics, sales data, and website analytics.

• Business process mining aims to reveal inefficiencies within business processes, allowing organizations to optimize their operations by making data-driven decisions based on the analysis of event logs. In contrast, data mining focuses on uncovering patterns and insights within large data sets, delivering insights that inform transformation programs, boost new revenue opportunities, and inform the business strategy.
• Business process mining involves process mining software to analyze event logs and visualize the as-is state of processes for process discovery, process conformance, and performance analysis. Data mining involves statistical and machine learning techniques like clustering, regression analysis, and decision trees. These techniques are used to identify patterns and trends within data to inform business strategy and identify automation opportunities for manual workflows, thus improving employee and customer experience.

Learn More: What is Process Intelligence?

Gain Comprehensive Insights into Processes with Scout^®

Today, more than 60% of the workday is spent on unstructured interactions in documents, emails, communications, custom applications – outside of ERP, CRM, and other systems of record.

This massive unstructured and undocumented interaction dataset between people and software is untapped and contains a goldmine of insights that could give a significant competitive edge to enterprises.

Organizations can unlock this data source through Scout^®, powered by the world’s first work graph platform, and unlock multiple opportunities to get insights into their business processes and streamline unnecessary variations of work.

To get started with Scout^®, click here.