What is process mining?

I’m getting more people asking me about process mining than almost anything else at the moment. What is it, and what can it do? Process mining is an essential component of digital transformation projects, but many business leaders are unclear about what it means, and what it can achieve. Put simply, it’s a way to monitor and analyse business processes, with a view to improving and streamlining them, automating them or proving value creation post any changes actioned.

It does this by working with an organisation’s structured data. In other words, data that’s in the system, in a readable format and quantitative. For example, it keeps track of, and analyses, instances in an organisation’s event logs (which will show actions such as when someone logs on to various systems to perform tasks).

How process mining can help your business reach its goals

1.     Performance monitoring – because it monitors all of the structured data in your systems, process mining gives organisations a clear picture of how their existing processes perform. It can set key performance indicators for the organisation’s processes, giving you a clear picture of where you need to improve.

2.     Creation of audit trails – process mining continuously creates easy to understand logs of what’s happening in your information systems, allowing the organisation to produce clear reports of processes for auditors.

3.     Automated process tracking improves organisation efficiency – process mining software works in the background, tracking, monitoring and analysing processes that business teams use. People can get on with more valuable work and insights into potential issues are identified swiftly (even in real-time), allowing you to address them quickly and get the business back on track to meeting its goals.

The barriers to adoption

Process mining isn’t going to be suitable for all organisations, and there are some barriers that your business could face when thinking about introducing process mining. Some of the most common are:

1.     You have simple processes/tasks. Process mining isn’t for everything. If it’s a two-click process, the insights you’ll gain are unlikely to be transformational. You really need multi-step, multi-person, multi-team and multi-touch point processes to gain true insight from this type of technology. The more complex the process, and the more touch points there are, the less you will already know about it, and the more insightful the process mining outputs will be.

2.     If you work with a lot of unstructured data, process mining won’t work with it. One major barrier is where and how the organisation’s data is stored. As I mentioned, process mining can only read structured data – data that’s clearly defined and organised in a way that makes it searchable. Unstructured data can be all over the place. For example, if you use sales database software to track every interaction your sales team has, this is information that process mining software can read. However, if your sales team keep individual spreadsheets using different formats, make lots of qualitative notes and keep a lot of data offline in notebooks, this is all unstructured data – unreadable by process mining tools.

3.     Lack of availability, or an unwillingness to grant access to, event log data. Your organisation might not work with many systems that use event log data – which makes it harder for process mining to analyse all of your processes. Even if this data is available, some businesses aren’t willing to give process mining providers access to their event logs, for security reasons. It means dealing with process management entirely in-house, which can cause more problems and delays.

4.     A fragmented data landscape. The business may have a variety of applications and systems that aren’t interconnected. It could face issues trying to link or integrate them. Ideally you’ll want to have a unique customer identifier end-to-end, through any system, to see the end- to-end customer process. This is something that an external partner could help the business overcome.

So, how do you get started with process mining?

It can feel like an overwhelming project to undertake if you’re considering it for the first time, but here are the essential early steps:

1.     Identify what processes you want to analyse. If you think you can just dump Process Mining into your organisation, you are wrong. You need to find the process or process areas, (following the other advice mentioned in this article) in order to maximise the value you will uncover.

2.     Conduct a ‘current state’ analysis. As Harvard Business Review points out, a crucial step towards getting an effective process mining system in place is creating a ‘current state’ process. Some businesses would rather start by looking at how they want a future system to operate, but you need to assess what the current state of their business management process is. (Are your systems connected? Is your data in a scannable format? Etc.)

3.     Use the current state analysis to set your KPIs for the project. It helps you identify where existing processes need improving, and gives you an idea of how much work is needed to see a significant return on your investment.

4.     Think about working with experts. Evaluate whether you have the skills and resources to do this in-house or if your budget is best spent working with an external partner.

There’s nowhere to hide when using process mining. It brings organisations closer to their goals by revealing hidden patterns in data and showing you where improvements are needed in your current processes. It isn’t suitable for all businesses, and you may need to do quite a bit of preparatory work to get the most benefit from process mining, but the results often speak for themselves. 

Thanks for reading folks