#18 The Process Mining Q&A Episode Part 1

You heard about process mining but are still unsure about how it works and why you should use it in your organization, then this episode is for you. Hello and welcome back to the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. In today's episode, you will find answers to the most common questions that we get from companies, mainly asking if they could use process mining to gain insights into their operations and business processes. We have also asked the audience recently what they'd like to know about process mining, and today we will share the answers with you. So let's get started. So we have a couple of questions here. So the first one up is, Arno, How does process mining software work?

Oh, Sasha, process mining software, and you know, there's various products on the market at the minute, but what it does, it draws event data directly from your backend information systems, such as your ERP systems, your CRM systems, even your BPM systems. And then it presents that automatically as a visualization in a flowchart, a dynamic flowchart, which you can then investigate. And all of this is dynamic. You can investigate then any part of your running processes and drill into, you know, different areas of your processes. You can look at trends, you know, on a high level of your processes. So really empowers you, you know, to tackle some of these, these kind of bigger processes challenges that we see. So for example, you can instantly identify inefficiencies and risks in your processes. So these are bottlenecks, for example, lead, long lead times, compliance violations, for example. And also, you know, you can spot new opportunities inside your processes. So for instance, you know, the most suitable and profitable processes for robotic process automation, for example. So it's really just something that gives you an insight. So there's a lot in process mining, but I think in a nutshell, it is all about discovering, you know, with inside your existing, pre-existing data set, you know, what are the opportunities, you know, where are the optimization that you can exploit within, inside your business. So there's always this question, you know, who can use process mining and where do you use it? And essentially, you know, any organization out there can use process mining and it's, you know, it's not limited to a specific industry, it's across industries as well. So the short answer is, you know, who can use it? Well, anybody can use it. All you need is just to be able to point this to, like I said, your existing ERP dataset. There is this thing where, you know, larger organizations with a lot more complicated processes do get a lot more out of process mining. And I think that to a degree is true because obviously the larger organization is, you know, the more sort of data you create and the more insights you can extract. So these process mining vendors, you know, they have process analyzers that could look at this data. And obviously the larger the dataset is, the better, because that would just, you know, give you a lot more insight as to the opportunities that exist with inside your data that could lead you to deploy robotic process automation, and also, you know, on a kind of a wider scale, you know, what's the direction of your digital transformation initiative? And of course, you know, for audit and compliance, when you look at your processes, you know, from an audit and compliance perspective, are you compliant? Are you compliant with, you know, the industry standards? How does your processes look like? So these are just evidence that is already within your data, but process mining actually unlocks that for you. So it's quite interesting that, you know, you talk about, let's look at the kind of the common questions and answers around process mining. And I think today what we want to touch on is really sort of this trend that we're following on the frequently asked questions. That people tend to ask us around the topic of process mining. The first one we'll look at is the typical one we tend to get, and I'll get your view on this in a second, where people already got a business intelligence system where they can obtain analytics. You know, and then they ask, well, you know what, why should we have another system that gives us information? You know, why should we deploy process mining? We've already got BI.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I just wanted to, before going to this one, so you mentioned, so there are huge benefits obviously by applying process mining into an organization. Just last week I was at a conference and GE Healthcare, for example, they used to enable the organization was process mining and they uncovered $1.3 billion of inefficiencies in the organization. And this is just incredible, obviously on a global scale. But without that, they obviously just had to guess where was that inefficiency and then they looked very siloed, this place here, this place there. Now having this full visibility, then that helped to to get this on sort of on one system and to really see where these inefficiencies are really. Yeah, so now to the question, so why should we take another system for analysis really of what's going on in the business? And yeah, there are clear differences between business intelligence systems and process mining. So both systems are really Yeah, they have the same purpose, sort of providing insights and what's going on in your business and in your processes and to make better decisions. Although both BI and process mining help you measure and monitor targets, process mining adds this by helping you quickly perform process analysis in real time. So, and it drills even a bit deeper and shows really, really good variations of processes, how they are running in real time as well. And it really comes with these pre-built templates and pre-built analysis, really, where you can look very specifically at bottlenecks for maybe purchase-to-pay, order-to-cash, these kind of things, compliance violations. So this is where it differentiates really from a normal BI tool where you maybe use probably more for KPIs and just yeah, that kind of stuff, but not really on the whole set of process variants running through your company.

Yeah, so I guess with business intelligence, you go in knowing what you're looking for because you specified it. Yeah, with process mining, it's the opposite. You don't necessarily know what you're looking for, and you're on this explorative mission, and then it reveals these things for you.

I get it right in real time. Yeah.

Yes, one is kind of predetermined. These are the sort of analytics that we need, or we can explore these things, and then there's a set of, of a kind of a framework that we work within, and it's known entities and known elements, whereas process mining really takes that to the extreme where it really unlocks these dark areas of manual processes inside your business.

Yeah, so it really helps you as well. So this is another really significant difference, is to really finding as well the root causes of what's going on. So you not just see that something is going on, so you can really drill in and find out, okay, just with this customer or just with this region we have that problem, and you can drill down really to the actual order, to the actual contract, because everything we're process mining does, it collects all these event data, isn't it, very specifically, order ID, timestamp, and what kind of stage it sort of is currently, and compiling all that stuff together. Yeah, process mining really reveals problem areas in the process by really showing them in this really nice user-friendly flowcharts, and you can really see what is the most important one to tackle.

Yeah, so kind of like the, I guess, the, you know, by looking at, you know, your data, it provides these answers, you know, what is happening in the background, when is it happening, but also why is it happening. That's the sort of things, right?

Yeah, and then I think one more difference between process mining and BI tools, Yeah, it's about the ease of use. So you mentioned that earlier, so you define it all proactively if you have a BI tool. But yeah, here now you have millions of rows you process, you couldn't really tackle with traditional BI methods. So you now get this really understandable overview and it's just really millions and trillions of data rows. If you think about GE, healthcare globally. So what, what kind of data volume they must have pulled into that, um, it's incredible. Um, and, and the data, and the data will grow even more, isn't it? So we will double the data again and again and again every year. Um, so, and I think only tools like process mining, always tools like process mining, you can really make that data really usable. And that's, um, that's extremely exciting.

Yeah, yeah.

So the next one which was submitted. Yeah, so when we find a problem in the process, how does process mining help us to fix those problems?

Yeah, and that's an excellent question. I think people approach process mining and look at it as a a magic unicorn that just goes out and fix problems. The reality is slightly different in that it will bring the unicorn out, but you still need to go out and, you know, fix those problems. But at least you know where they are, right? Because if you do have a very large organization with lots of processes, process mining can actually give you that ranking where to go and spent your effort at and which area of your business to really focus on, you know, for these problematic processes. You know, they always say it's not to say that you could use, let's say, Word, for instance, you can write brilliant documents and it's the same with process mining. You know, it can't fix problems for you, but it has got built-in root cause analysis and it does help you to identify and locate these, you know, most significant, these most significant problems. And because it's visual, you can see that at a glance, and it can also notify you when things go wrong in the process. So, so you can then proactively act to optimize these processes within, you know, the business units where the impact is really large, and you can fix these issues before, before they even happen, um, you know, rather than waiting a year down the line and, um, you know somebody notifying it that something's going wrong and it costs the business, you know, a lot of money. And, you know, when you discover, you know, how these processes work in reality, you can also find other areas that you want to dig in a bit deeper. So I guess it's sort of fixing a specific thing and it can either be tactically, but I think process mining gives you the ability to drill deeper into areas of the process where at least you fix something, it's better. Now you can actually refine, you know, that process a lot more. And, you know, again, with most of these tools, they support root cause analysis. They give you very good metrics on root cause analysis. So, you know, so you could, again, you could see what's causing the bigger problems, such as the long lead times, or where's a lot of repetitive, you know, work. And again, you know, besides sort of identify the areas that's, that's causing problems, like I said earlier, it also ranks them according to their contributions to business outcomes, for example. So you could prioritize these corrective actions that you want to take But you still need to fix that problem, and in order to fix that problem, you need to identify it first and what's the kind of the root cause of that. And that's really important. So again, this idea that process mining gives you good root cause analysis is really key to it because it is really integral to its success. You could use this to instantly analyze these processes, you know, the duration of these processes, the conformance to compliance, for example. And this is really important sort of capabilities that allows you to unlock these problems. And get to the root cause of a problem.

You mentioned earlier, so this was process mining, and when this problem occurs in real time, end users and business owners might be notified about this problem and they can then immediately take action. I think the next step when we're obviously talking about sort of end-to-end automation, so we can plug our automation in that real-time identification of a problem. So instead of just being notified about, hey, there was this kind of issue, we can then take that further and automate that resolution in our backend system. So if we identified a compliance issue here, we can notify people, but at the same time we might need to go into our ERP, into our SAP system to change something, maybe on the Unfortunately, that's it again with this episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it! [MUSIC] [MUSIC]