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Case study: How a manufacturing company reduced its costs based on insights gained during process mining
Process mining helps companies to collect and analyse the information they need to optimise their processes.
According to research conducted by AIMultiple, 83% of companies declared they planned to implement process optimisation technologies. Despite plans aiming at implementation, business leaders are unsure of the benefits of process mining and cannot easily decide where to start. The following is an attempt to shed light through a case study on the benefits of process mining as explained earlier.
A manufacturing company implemented IBM's Process Mining solution to render its purchasing and payment process transparent. As a result of the project, the company gained insight into inappropriate procurements, outstanding accounts receivable, losses stemming from discounts, and automation opportunities in all areas. The company implemented changes based on the results, leading rewardingly to optimisation and cost reduction.
The results achieved were the following:
Automation from ordering to invoicing,
Average invoice administration time reduced by 47%,
Detection of inappropriate procurements, ability to intervene,
6% reduction in average order approval time,
9% FTE savings in IT,
Reduction of contract deviations and early payments, with a $1 million cash flow improvement.
The most obvious business benefit is the ability to make informed, data-driven decisions using process mining tools. We can:
Understand how our process actually works, identify deviations and standardise them;
Make our processes measurable and track various KPIs (SLA, solution time, deadline compliance, etc.) through dashboards;
Get objective feedback on the success of an action and its impact on our KPIs;
Process mining can reduce our costs. We can:
Optimise human resource utilisation by identifying bottlenecks and excess capacities;
Uncover hidden gaps and opportunities for automation;
Eliminate redundant steps that reduce efficiency.
We can improve customer experience:
We can reduce turnaround times and improve response speed, ultimately improving customer satisfaction.
Better SLAs, compliance.
Process mining enables the organisation to perform its SLAs using the fastest process routes;
We can eliminate process variants not in compliance with standards.
As the example above shows, process mining can also mobilise hidden reserves which, without proper analysis of the data, would not come to the surface.
Source: https://research.aimultiple.com/process-mining-benefits/