What is Process Mining?
- October 14, 2022
- 7 minute read
Process mining is the science of collecting enterprise operations data and pre-defined process models and applying data mining and data science techniques to reveal the current state of process standardization.
According to the Task Mining Playbook launched by Soroco in collaboration with Everest Group, process mining solutions assist enterprises in faster fact-based discovery of as-is processes, check the processes for compliance, and ensure consistent processes across business units.
Essentially, process mining solutions capture process-related information from event logs generated by enterprise systems such as ERP, CRM, and supply chain management to discover and analyze as-is processes, according to Everest Group, a leading research firm.
Data from Fortune Business Insights indicates that the market for process mining is soaring, with global process mining software market size tipped to reach USD 15,546.4 million by 2029.
Top Benefits of Process Mining
Process mining enables organizations to discover how employees or customers are using and use the data to run them more efficiently with process mining tools. With a combination of automation, AI, and analytics technologies, process mining tools capture structured data from systems of record such as ERPs and CRPs and present as-is processes against existing process models, providing recommendations on actions that can be taken to improve performance, and provide ongoing monitoring and benchmarking analysis to track progress.
Successful business transformation relies on information and insights. With process mining tools, organizations can better understand how the process works at each level and gain data-driven insights to make informed business decisions.
Characteristics of Process Mining tools:
- Collect event log data from different information systems such as ERP, and CRM, which contain data, time user activity.
- Generate process maps capturing different process variants with the sequence of tasks/steps involved.
- Extract relevant business insights such as process discovery, root cause analysis, process conformance checks and process benchmarking.
Learn More: Understand Task Mining and Process Mining
Key Applications of Process Mining are:
With process mining tools, organizations can get unprecedented insights into the processes. Here are five ways organizations can drive process improvement opportunities, cost reductions and realize potential ROI from process mining solutions.
Process discovery: Provides in-depth information about as-is processes, generates a process map with different process variants and provides the option to dive deep into each variant. It also displays process information such as case frequency, activity frequency, throughput time, total cycle time, cost and resources consumed.
Process conformance: Checks for compliance rules, provides insights into deviations from as-is process models and segregates conformant and non-conformant cases. Performs root cause analysis on all the cases to identify the causes of process path deviations and highlights gaps with maximum impact.
Process monitoring and standardization: Through this, organizations can verify processes against key metrics using historical or near real-time information. In addition, organizations can also compare and standardize process performance across teams, units and geographies.
Process simulation: With process mining tools/solutions, organizations can perform what-if analysis and visualize to-be scenarios, generate virtual logs of simulated models to assist for before vs. After comparison of process steps and drive predictive insights.
Action triggers: Process mining solution automatically triggers action steps such as assigning a task to a particular user if certain criteria are met and issuing alerts for any SLA violations or any events that require attention. The tool also triggers RPA robots to carry out high-severity tasks.
Learn More: Soroco Launches First-Ever Task Mining Playbook By Everest Group
Process Mining Use Cases
Process mining can be leveraged across industries to drive a positive impact on businesses. For example, in the insurance sector, claims handling is a core process. Due to the complexity of various claims categories and the high number of unique cases, there can be execution gaps in claims processing. Process mining can be leveraged to classify claims and discover the most optimal path for different categories to ensure the claims are processed within the specified duration. Additionally, by conducting a detailed process variant analysis, the process mining solution can also compare claims handling between different regions to validate the effectiveness of process redesign.
Here’s another example that underscores the effectiveness of process mining solutions in the supply chain industry. In the supply chain sector, companies end up increasing the inventory stock when they do not receive on-time delivery of raw materials from vendors. However, increasing inventory stock is inefficient and can skew production planning. Process mining can address these issues by analyzing the root cause and detecting blind spots and bottlenecks otherwise unknown to operational resources, thereby streamlining the inventory planning process.
Similarly, in the healthcare sector, process mining can help reduce patient onboarding wait time. Generally, patients take a series of administrative steps, often leading to long wait times for admission. The biggest challenge for hospitals is to reduce patient wait time while adhering to onboarding procedures and compliances. Process mining solutions can alert staff in near real-time about cases where compliance guidelines aren’t met, and further help reduce patient onboarding cycle time.
