Process mining helps you mine for digital transformation ROI – learn how

Lately there’s increased pressure on businesses to digitally transform. Competition is driving organizations to become more agile, so they can respond to fast-changing markets and customer demands. One of the best ways to do this is to optimize business processes and solve operational challenges, in ways that transform the business for the better. No wonder automation and business process optimization were top of transformation to-do lists in 2019, according to CIO.com.

You can’t transform old business processes without investing in new processes, however – the cost of transformation can be very high. So it’s important to ask:

• “Which business process transformation investments will deliver most value?”
• “Will the investment help achieve our business goals?”
• “How can we optimize business process investments to get the most value?”

“Process mining” is specifically designed to answer these questions. It’s a valuable technique that is growing in importance for global enterprises. Gartner published its first “Market Guide for Process Mining” a year ago – it found that process mining is helping leaders to “boost the efficiency, effectiveness and value” of transformation initiatives “to attain targeted business outcomes”. Just what businesses are looking for.

How does process mining lead to better investments?

The way process mining actually works is to…

• Discover how existing business processes are being used in real life and uncover inconsistencies, based on actual data
• Reveal data about the tasks in each process – such as rework, time taken per task, cost per task and impact on the overall process and business performance
• Revealing problems and bottlenecks via in-depth analytics

These insights simply cannot be uncovered without process mining.

The practice goes even further, however. Businesses can also use process mining to simulate “What if” scenarios, which predict the real impact of proposed processes improvements and optimizations in terms of costs and time. This enables businesses to compare different changes, make the right investments… and of course, avoid making the wrong ones!

Making process mining easier with automation

Process mining used to be a difficult task. Harvard Business Review reports that in the past, companies would often outsource it to consultants at great cost. Some companies even skipped it altogether.

Thankfully, new software solutions have made process mining more accessible and more effective.

Process mining software captures and analyzes information from business data systems and uses analytics to visualize and answer questions such as:

• How is the process being executed in real life? Are there variations in execution in the same or different branches?
• How are the different resources in the process performing?
• How long does each process step take?
• What is the level of rework?
• How is each process step performing against key performance indicators (KPIs)?
• How do new process variations impact the outcomes (KPIs)? For example, does it speed up service delivered to customers or slows them down or does it make the supply chain more efficient or introduces new bottlenecks?

Powerful insights: multi-level process mining

Business processes and the relationships between them can be extremely complex. So, to be really effective, process mining solutions need to be able to capture and understand complex relationships in detail. “Multi-level process mining” is a recent evolution designed to work with complex process relationships.

Multi-level process mining offers three key innovations that together, represent a huge leap forward:

1. The ability to map complex processes that span multiple systems – including many-to-many relationships between them, and consolidating the data on each system into a single and more accurate view
2. Next-generation insights – including how many times a process ran in a time period, how many process-runs met compliance goals, bottleneck analysis, actual process cost analysis, and detailed timelines for each task
3. Advanced what-if analysis – enabling businesses to simulate a process change before implementing it, to see what the impact will be and improve risk management

Want to learn more about process mining?

If your business is planning digital transformation, process mining can be a valuable step in the journey.

With multi-level process mining, that step delivers more detailed and accurate insights, as well as enabling you to simulate your work systems – so you can experiment with your envisioned processes before putting them into production.

It’s even more accessible than you think. At GBM, we’re providing solutions to leading enterprises in the Gulf region. We can help you explore the possibilities further with a discussion about your objectives and a demonstration of what you can expect from process mining. Please feel free to reach out – we are here to support your digital transformation.

myInvenio, https://www.my-invenio.com/myinvenio-process-insight/#data

CAPTION: Process mining visualization