The first steps in Process mining
Two years ago the businesses started its Process Mining journey, aiming to achieve business process improvement at scale. In this article, dear reader, let me share some reflections on Process Mining as a Project manager, and also as a experienced user in the Global Process Owner (GPO) team.
What is Process mining?
In a nutshell Process mining is a business process study based on its digital footprint in the business applications. Process mining creates a real map of business process using relevant events from logs or system journals.
Firstly it allows you to obtain objective quantitative data about the process. Process mining answers numerous “How many” questions about the process, for example, how many sales orders were created in the system on average per day? How many people were working on them? How many customers order products twice a week, and how many every day?
Secondly, thanks to Process Mining, you get data visualization in the form of interactive process map. The map gives you instant insights into the real situation in the business. For example, if at some stage the customer has to make changes in his order, then on the order-to-cash process map you would see a “loop” — the order has returned.
Thirdly, Process mining allows you to analyze process variants from most common to exceptional and understand if standardization is there, or yet to be achieved; see which process steps turn into bottlenecks and how much they impact overall lead time.
Process mining offers powerful zoom in and out feature. Any KPI or dashboard can be viewed at enterprise, business unit, or country level. Also it is possible to examine the process at the very lowest level by looking into the journey of individual process objects like Sales order, Invoice or a Ticket in Case explorer.
Would your business benefit from Process mining?
Process Mining makes sense to apply in environment where business processes are at scale and generate lots of data. Consider process mining for large enterprises, marketplaces, and shared economy services.
As a priority, the business would be interested to make improvement of revenue generating process , that’s why process mining is most often applies to Sales , or ideally all aspects of interaction with the customer: from lead generation and order placement to invoicing and cash application.
The second most popular is Request to Pay process. Process mining is a solution for financial controls. The Big Four auditors are actively working towards making digital audit a standard practice. They use process mining applications to reconstruct business processes from client’s digital footprint and identify gaps.
In my opinion Process mining is extremely helpful in business services where customers and employees collaborate using workflow or ticketing application or CRM. For example, you get an option to study literally everything about IT helpdesk process by examining tickets using Process mining: how many tickets are being created per period, how long does it take to serve a customer, what kind of tickets appear most often, how employees work with them and how customers react. You can also easily get various operational metrics: the number of tickets per person, the average time to complete a ticket, and so on. This level of transparency is not achievable using customer surveys only.
What business problems were solved with help of using Process mining?
These are example use cases from Order-to-cash process:
Customers of several subsidiaries experienced delays in product delivery, and Customer service and Credit teams were stressed out. Process mining dashboard indicated, credit check denials occurred much more frequently in these entities than in others. Deep-dive into system settings showed that they were stricter than required by the credit policy. System settings were updated, and number of credit blocks were reduced, subsequently leading to process acceleration and simplification.
The business wanted to improve customer payments application process by investing limited resources into automation. With help of Process mining, we ranked target entities by current level of automation and realized that only a few companies were driving 50% of all manual transactions on incoming payments. On customer level only 20% of customer generated 80% invoice volumes — they were the best candidates for automation. Process mining enabled us to understand where to focus limited resources to achieve maximum ROI.
Process mining is a great tool to have fact-based discussions with your Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) provider. It gives transparency into business volumes, user activity and process efficiency.
What does it take to implement Process Mining?
Process mining solution market is quite mature. The business can choose the most suitable product from more than 20 professional offers. Launching Process mining is not too complex technically. However in case if existing systems are poorly connected to each other, achieving high data transparency might be a challenge. Let me give you an example: the business runs purchasing process in SAP Ariba and financial accounting in SAP Hana. If two systems are integrated, Process mining will present that business process end to end: from purchase requisition to supply to invoice and payment. But if there is no integration between systems, it is not easy to created a single process map.
I came across a trend, that Process Mining could be sold to the management as a system that “changes the world”. This is a misunderstanding. Process mining is a game-changing enabler to get insights into the process realities at all levels. But driving process improvement requires efforts beyond process mining.
Start Process mining course with a clear definition of future users. Rolling it out to the Business process owner typically involves a limited group of stakeholders, so that the governance and adoption should be not a problem. But if the goal is to use operational metrics across all organization levels, you would spend a significant effort on super-user training and custom content creation.
