What is Process Mining?

Valenta > Blogs > What is Process Mining?
what is process mining

In this blog we will define and take a closer look at what is Process Mining.  Process mining is data science software that retrieves and analyzes other business enterprise software event data and logs to document a business’s processes from start to finish.  Let’s examine why it is important, how it works, how it effects automation, and what businesses can benefit from it.

Why is Process Mining Important?

Before we take a deeper dive into process mining let’s discuss why it is important.  Process mining is important because process mapping can only take you so far in accurately mapping out workflows and identifying candidate processes to optimize and automate.  Even with the most skilled consultants and employees and in the most open of organizations things can be missed and blind spots not accounted for.

Process Mining provides a digital footprint of processes and a company’s real workflow, it is the best way to see how your business actually functions.  Using process mining software tools, every variation in process and bottleneck can be identified.  Blind spots will also be uncovered.  Potentially, the best aspect to process mining is that it is purely data driven and has no agenda and no biases.  Using process mining software, the results truly exemplify the idiom, ”it is what it is.”

How Process Mining Works

Process mining software sits on servers or cloud instances retrieving logs for review from other critical enterprise software tools.  Process mining is solely focused on this collection of system data.  Process mining should not be confused with Task Mining.  Task mining monitors desktop and individual user activity and provides user data.  When used together, process mining and task mining are extremely powerful and provide a 360-degree view of a business’s processes.

Process mining data science provides a crystal clear “as is” process map through the retrieval and mapping of event and data logs.  Process mining allows consultants, companies, and COE’s who leverage process mining to create a better plan for where a business wants to be.  Mapping process mining onto target KPI or key performance indicators to improve overall company performance can dramatically help businesses improve their results, revenues, and profitability.

How long tasks and processes take, exactly how many steps they take, and the root causes of any issues are identified easily with process mining.  Process mining and task mining also provide plenty of ideas on how to fix issues.  Two of the best aspects of how process and task mining works is that it provides a single source of data on processes plus breaks down any silos between departments.

What Process Mining Means for Automation

Process mining can enable fully automated enterprises.  Using data science tools like process mining to identify all the opportunities for automation opens the door to easily finding new RPA and IPA opportunities.  Mapping out the best paths for processes creates the flywheel effect in companies pursuing a path of automation.  Typically process mining is put into the hands of a COE once an organization has embraced automation and RPA.

In our experience, use of process mining usually begins after a company has completed an easier project or automated a previously painful process and now wants to accomplish more.  Process Mining software works with and can capture logs for analysis from software such as SAP, SAP Ariba, Oracle JDE, Oracle Peoplesoft, Oracle EBS, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Workday, and more.

Process mining is particularly good for mining and mapping processes like order to cash, accounts payable, purchase to pay, accounts receivable, production, quality management, service management, incident management, claims management, lead to order, and more.

Businesses that can benefit from Process Mining

Large or small business can benefit from process mining much like both benefit from automation and RPA.  Process mining software is typically enterprise class software and may be out of the reach, commercially and skills-wise for SMB.  Valenta uses process mining software regularly and can provide them as a service on behalf of SMB and SME.  Many different industries and market segments can also benefit from process mining.

Financial Service companies can leverage it for, loan approval, risk management, investment management, fraud detection and more.  Telecommunication providers can deploy it and mine client acquisition, sales and billing management, and service management activities for optimization.  Healthcare and medical providers can mine testing processes, patient journey, and to streamline insurance processing, and billing processing.

Manufacturing companies can use it for analysis and mining of processes related to materials sourcing, production planning, delivery processing and order processing.  One final example for this blog is supply and logistics enterprises that can mine order-to-cash, purchase-to-pay, stock and delivery processes, and quality management procedures.

Want to get started?

Process mining data science paints an accurate, data driven picture of what is taking place with a business’s processes.  In our experience there is “what you think the process path is” and “what it actually is.”  There is never an exact match between these two.  This is one place process mining truly shines.  The other area it truly shines is helping to identify every single automation opportunity that there is in a business.  If Process Mining is something your business wants to undertake Valenta is here to help.  If you would like to learn more about Process Mining, Task Mining, RPA, or Digital Transformation our website is an excellent place to start.  AI Website.  If you would like to schedule a free consultation, please reach out to us here.  Contact us

Leave a Reply