What is Business Process Mining?
- February 6, 2023
- 7 minute read
A whopping 90% of businesses that use process mining are confident about reaching their process improvement targets, as per Forrester. So, what does this technology mean, and is it related to data mining? Learn what business process mining means for your organization below.
What is Business Process Mining?
Business process mining is a collection of data-driven approaches for analyzing business processes based on event data retrieved from information systems. It allows you to identify roadblocks, duplication, and causes of wastage in your processes and uncover opportunities to enhance performance and achieve better business outcomes – by automating the tasks.
Learn More: What is Process Mining?
How is Business Process Mining related to Data Mining?
Data mining examines a specific dataset and seeks to identify patterns in large amounts of datasets to forecast future events based on previously undiscovered data correlations. On the other hand, business process mining is the application of data mining methods and algorithms to classify business processes to optimize and streamline them to impact the company’s bottom line.
Tools for data mining alone cannot sufficiently help analyze business processes. Thus, business process mining is essential for generating the organization’s process map. For instance, one can feed business process and event data into the system to create the organization’s process map.
How Does Business Process Mining Work?
Business functions run on processes. For instance, when a customer support request is generated, a ticket is logged in the CRM, and the software provides data on time taken for ticket resolution. It also includes time-stamped records of purchases. These standard business procedures create a trail of event logs. By deploying process mining solutions, one can identify broad patterns by analyzing historical data and capture of how processes are executed.
Now let us look at the steps of the business process mining process:
● To collect event logs from the company’s system, the process mining tools integrate with several business record-keeping systems, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM).
● From the event logs, the tools for data mining and business process mining (the former is a subset of the latter) extract the activity sequence data for each instance.
● After determining the activity sequence for each example, process mining tools “merge” the activity sequences.
● As a consequence of possible variations, the real process will be more complex than anticipated. This output also helps the organization to determine if there is non-conformance or deviations from the best practices and standard operating procedure outlined.
Learn More: What Is Process Discovery?
Uses of Business Process Mining
It will Business process mining can be leveraged for the following:
1. Business process discovery: Process discovery uses event logs to create a model of how a process runs in the organization. There are no past process models to guide the development of modeling.
2. Enhance Process conformance: Based on its event log data, the process model provides a quick and easy way to visualize how the process is being executed and detects if there’s any deviation from desired process path. This approach simplifies the detection of process non-compliance and also uncovers any variations from the planned model.
3. Business process mining for organizational improvements Here, data is used to enhance an established process model. The result of conformance testing, for instance, can aid in detecting bottlenecks inside a process model, thereby providing managers with information about what to automate.
Learn More: What Is Business Process Automation?
Benefits of Business Process Mining for Your Organization
Using business process mining software can be beneficial as it:
- Provides objective, fact-based insights drawn from real data to assist in auditing, analyzing, and automating current operations.
- Is more precise and efficient than the long, subjective procedure mapping exercises or 1:1 interviews with subject matter experts.
- Surveys procedures across the organization at a large scale and with minimal human effort.
- Regularly monitors processes and quantifies real-time improvements.
- Runs atop current systems
Experience the Soroco ScoutTM Advantage
Business process mining is limited to log data from transactional systems, which is a narrower and more targeted approach. But today, employees spend over 60% of their time outside these systems of records on unstructured interactions in documents, emails, communications, custom applications, and websites.
By leveraging Scout work graph, organizations can unlock this data source and gain a comprehensive, fact-based picture of their processes, along with a view into the user’s last mile of experience at work and any variations in it. This data is key for building a data-based digital transformation program with multiple levers such as automation, targeted user training, and streamlining unnecessary variations of work.
To get started with Scout, click here
