What is process discovery?
Process discovery, sometimes called business process discovery (BPD), is the act of creating a model (i.e. a graphic representation) that can be used to analyze and optimize a process.
Process discovery emerged from the concepts of business process orientation (BPO) and business process management (BPM), which gained traction in the 1980s and 1990s. BPO is a management philosophy that encourages businesses to organize around the processes that add customer value instead of using a more traditional hierarchical structure. BPM is the process of discovering, modeling, analyzing and optimizing business processes.
In the early days of BPO and BPM, process discovery was often a highly manual process. Teams would dig through existing process documentation to identify all the people, activities, objects and systems involved in the workflow. Companies would hire consultants to conduct user interviews and facilitate workshops with employees, subject matter experts (SMEs) and process stakeholders. These in-person process discovery or process mapping exercises often involved people spending hours in a conference room drawing lines on a whiteboard or paper taped to a wall that’s filled with a rainbow of multicolored sticky notes. The resulting process map often resembled a flow chart.
With the rise of process mining technology in the late 1990s, pioneered by Professor Wil Van der Aalst, referred to as the “Godfather of process mining,” process discovery was dramatically transformed. Process mining software creates models using event data extracted from the information systems on which modern businesses operate, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM). Instead of paper maps based on subjective and sometimes inaccurate human descriptions, process mining creates objective, data-driven models. Process mining allows us to see how processes actually work instead of how people think they work.
