What Is Process Mining & How Can It Automate Workflows?

Q: What types of process mining are there?

Process mining techniques include three basic types: Discovery Process Mining, Conformance Checking, and Enhancement.

Process mining utilizes event log data from enterprise systems to discover, validate, and improve processes. By analyzing detailed log data from organizational systems, process mining uncovers information about process performance, revealing bottlenecks and inefficiencies.

Enterprise applications and systems, like enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) tools, provide audit trails with detailed activity log data. Process mining utilizes these logs, including timestamps, user IDs, and transaction details, to chart processes, outlining process details and variations.

Insights from process mining can help uncover the root causes of business process delays and other performance issues as well as help establish benchmarks, improve workflows, and expedite automation initiatives.

What can process data mining do for me?

Every business, group, or organization can benefit from instant and real process automation. These advantages start with higher efficiency within the systems themselves, but they also expand to other areas.

You can analyze the effectiveness of employee training and improve it by identifying commonly made mistakes. You'll find opportunities to increase sales and even be able to identify vendors that can meet the challenging demands of a new project. And the more you automate, the more wide-ranging these benefits become.

Increase Productivity

By eliminating bottlenecks, finding new ways to handle exceptions, and eliminate inefficiencies, every element of your business can do more in less time. Add other AI (such as AI agents) and automation to existing process mining. Then, you can automate redundant tasks so that higher-skilled team members can focus more on doing what matters while process mining information systems to monitor the rest.

Reduce Risk

Systems are outstanding when everything remains the same, but exceptions can be disastrous. Steps get forgotten, things get missed, and mistakes get made. Optimizing a system based on what you think is happening means you risk failing to account for unforeseen circumstances, making the problem even worse. Process mining reduces these risks and allows you to make confident decisions.

Improve Employee Satisfaction

On the outside, end-to-end process mining appears only to benefit the business, but that's not true. When employees and team members have confidence in the systems they use and no longer need to perform redundant or repetitive tasks, they're motivated to make a difference and add value. They're also likely to procrastinate less.

Increase Accuracy

Instead of working from an idealized system concept, process mining provides a clear picture of a system regardless of the circumstance. There's less room to make a mistake. However, process mining also means consistency, so more straightforward tasks follow the same process.

Lower Costs

Process mining means fewer mistakes to deal with, less time wasted, more of the information you need, and the flexibility to focus on the things that make you money and increase customer satisfaction. There is a multitude of use cases demonstrating how to reduce inefficiencies in almost every industry.

Open Opportunities

Because process mining works with any system that creates event logs, it's easy to find previously hidden opportunities. You can identify vendors that can better meet your needs, spot underutilized positions or employees, or find partners with room to improve. The possibilities are endless when you combine process discovery with Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

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Who uses process mining?

Whether your goal is to get products delivered to customers, provide flawless financial services, or supplying high-quality educational products, your entire business can benefit from process mining. These simple bots work silently to help identify problem areas within processes, monitor them with impressive accuracy. And because they're affordable, scalable, and flexible, they'll change with your company. Process mining uses include:

E-Commerce

Process mining gives marketing, web development, and even sales teams a distinct advantage. They can learn more about customer behavior and buying decisions and rely less on stereotype-based personas. You can improve recommendation engines and take the unknowns out of upselling.

Customer Service

Salesforce, SAP, and many other CRM programs create event logs, and therefore, are ideal for process mining. Use this information to automate lifecycle tracking, highlight areas with room for improvement, and increase the efficiency of lead tracking. As a result, you can spend more time on leads that will pay off and less time on those that won't.

Manufacturing

Successful manufacturing requires you to assess, monitor, and track supply chains, CRMs, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and more. You'll be better able to reduce waste, assign resources more effectively, and get accurate and quantifiable productivity measurements. You can then present data-supported ideas, make decisions, and see the ROI of your changes in real-time.

Education

Better courses and learning outcomes require you to understand how students learn and where they struggle. Process mining lets you detect and trace where students spend their time, compare their results, and match that information to the course content. The outcome? Everyone achieves higher levels of success with less effort.

Healthcare

Process improvement through automated business process management demystifies healthcare operations and makes it easy to match them against key performance indicators (KPIs). You can learn more about treatment processes and how they affect healthcare facilities, professionals, and patients. You'll be able to improve patient care, reduce bottlenecks, track outcomes, and increase the accuracy of every decision you make.

Software

Software development often looks like productive chaos. Process maps bring order to the confusion by crafting a visualization that gives everyone a clear picture of how everything works and where each person fits into the process. Then, use this and other artificial intelligence solutions to track and document everything, monitor everything, and identify problematic situations instantly.

Frequently asked questions about process mining and business processes

What types of process mining are there?

Process mining techniques include three basic types:

Discovery Process Mining

Used when it is the first process model created (no priori)
Data comes solely from log data.
Creates process maps of existing operational processes

Conformance Checking

Used when a priori, or prior model, exists
Compares event log data with an existing model
Identifies exceptions and non-typical events

Enhancement

Makes use of a current model
Seeks ways to improve the existing model in terms of timing, costs, and other traits
Ideal for optimizing processes

Are process mining and process discovery the same thing?

No. Process mining technology only works with systems that produce event data logs. It maps out the various steps within the many areas of business operations. It can identify these work processes, evaluate them, and extract knowledge to help you gain insights into what happens in the process from end to end. Process discovery involves learning and analyzing how humans interact with business processes and using this information along with log data.

Can I benefit from process mining once I've made changes and optimized my business processes?

Yes! Once you've implemented changes, process mining is still a valuable business process management (BPM) tool. It will continue monitoring these systems to ensure you're getting the returns you should. You'll also have a complete audit trail you can use for compliance and other business purposes.

Does process mining software work with other automation solutions?

Absolutely. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has become a vital tool alongside process mining. RPA can automate any routine or repetitive tasks that eat up hours of paid time for little reward. This way, your team can focus on more critical tasks that use their skills and expertise without worrying about completing mundane tasks on time.

Is optimizing with process mining really that important in business process management (BPM)?

The idea of optimizing business process management (BPM) seems simple at first. Watch a process, point out where the problem is within the workflow, and change it in some way to make it less of a pain point. Unfortunately, simplifying the process misses all the intricate details the complex procedures often entail, creating misunderstandings around the system's actual functionality.

Not everyone is involved in every step of a procedure. Bad habits and workarounds for errors become standard practice. And sometimes, things change, which forces your system to change. The result? Wasted time, mistakes, inaccuracies, financial loss, and maybe even more significant problems.

By ensuring your business processes are cost-effective, flexible, and precise, you can quickly adapt to change and spend that newfound free time on customers and keeping them happy. You'll reduce costs and increase your ROI just by getting more out of the systems you already use.

How do I get started with process mining?

Automating, optimizing, and redesigning business information systems can only be effective when you base them on actual data rather than idealized perceptions of a system. That makes process mining the perfect place to start. And to do that, you must begin with a plan.

To get the best results, create a document you can use to guide you through the process. Make a list of business goals with information on the priority and key performance indicators (KPIs) associated with each one. Map out a timeline for the various tasks and list the key stakeholders to ensure everyone is on the same page. Lastly, you'll find a list of potential data sources and the benefits of including each regarding how they relate to your goals.