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3 min read
Process mining - Understanding through data how a company works
In our previous article, we wrote about optimisation - the process of revealing and exploiting the available reserves inherent in the production environment through the analysis of our performance and the data and information that describe it.
One possible way to understand the reasons behind business performance is to analyse and evaluate processes. As a company grows, there is an increasing need for organised operation and standardised processes.
But do our processes actually work as we put them on paper? Can we run our processes efficiently?
These and similar questions are answered by process mining, which has become one of the most important technologies in business in recent years. Process mining can be used in many areas of business, e.g. manufacturing processes, supply chain, incident management, credit application, website visits, healthcare.
But first, let's define what a process and in particular process mining is. A process is a sequence of tasks that are performed to achieve a specified goal. Process mining refers to a collection of tools, methods, techniques, algorithms, etc. that allow a better understanding of the execution of a process by analysing the operational execution data generated during the execution of the process.
The benefits of process mining are:
Objective, fact-based insights: It provides insight using objective, fact-based data obtained from the actual performance of processes so that you can make informed decisions to improve your existing business processes.
Faster, cheaper and more accurate: Faster, cheaper and more accurate than lengthy and often biased process exposure surveys, interviews, workshops.
Transparency: The turnaround times of our processes can be improved along with informed, data-driven decisions, and the impact of interventions can be measured and monitored.
System-independent: Process logs extracted from any system can be analysed without actually interrupting the process.
Application areas of process mining:
Identifying the bottleneck steps that slow down the process,
Process audit, e.g. split of duties, compliance,
Identifying human capacity issues, substitutability,
Process diagnostics, monitoring and insights.
It can therefore be seen that process mining can help a company to improve its efficiency in many areas, i.e. to mobilise its hidden reserves. It enables business users to understand how their core business processes run and identify gaps that block performance improvement before taking intelligent, automated steps to close those process gaps. At the same time, process mining helps to reduce costs and improve customer experience and compliance.