With over 450 process implementations, we know exactly what the crucial parts of a successful Process Mining initiative are
Can Process Mining Drive You to Success?
Change is Coming
Gartner listed Process Mining as part of augmented analytics in its Technology Trends 2022. For many years, it’s been obvious that data-based business optimization offers significant business potential, for example, in the fields of automation or conformance. Although Process Mining was at first limited to the area of Business Process Management (BPM), it now makes a direct contribution towards cost reduction, risk reduction and improved customer service through seamless integration with ERP systems and various enterprise applications.
As is the case with S/4HANA (by 2025), at some point companies will need to or even have to migrate their ERP system. That is a highly interesting use case for Process Mining. What should be transferred to the new system? Which old processes should be shut down? Which processes should be changed? Many of the questions that arise are strategic in nature, as they are directly in line with the long-term strategy and goals of an organization. In this particular case, Process Mining aids decision making in a clear manner: it shows the processes as-is, which processes are worth optimizing, and which processes simply need a redesign due to new or changing business requirements. This can significantly reduce discussion time, implementation uncertainty, and associated risk.
Organizations are Complex
Unfortunately, IT and business owners often bring their own subjective perspective into discussions, due to their own bosses, department strategies, and organizational requirements. What can be often described as “political” issues are just information silos and therefore different realities clashing together. Process Mining establishes a common framework for both IT or data departments and other core business departments, enabling collaboration for effective discussions around business processes. In fact, the traditional analysis of business processes through interviews and simple visualization ties up resources, takes very long, and is expensive and prone to errors. By the time a traditional process analysis has been completed, it might be already outdated and not replicable in the short term due to reasons of cost and resources.
The sheer complexity and variety of processes, even in medium-sized companies, means more intelligent and simple tools are required
That is why Process Mining becomes so efficient: modern Process Mining solutions can be installed within a few days and offer the advantage that they analyze each process in a simple way – thanks to the digital footprint that every action leaves in an IT system. With the help of various patterns and based on historical data, an analysis is carried out, from which an easily understandable and highly visual process map with all relevant filtering options is automatically generated for all further investigations.
It is simple, repeatable, and doesn’t incur any additional costs. As the way of working becomes transparent, practically in real time, business analysts from the specialist departments as well as general managers are now able to look deep into operational processes independently, without the need for a data scientist.
So: Is Process Mining Necessary for Success?
As is known and marketed well, Process Mining uncovers the bottlenecks and deviations within the operational processes and provides the information needed to make operational changes. It can prioritize required changes, and measure and evaluate the effects of these changes. And most of this is completed in a matter of less than one hour inside your Process Mining software, instead of multiple days with reports from various sources. As mentioned earlier, it can not only help create process architecture and flows that are operationally more efficient, but it can assist strategic transformations of different kinds. And in today’s times, being able to transform your organization or business model quick and well is one of the most important factors for long term success.
Andreas Klötzel
Co-Founder & Co-CEO
a.kloetzel@processand.com
Alexandra Tyrkich
Data Science Team Lead
