Process Adherence uses process mining to help an organization reconcile their “as-is” process execution with their “should-be” operating model in a way that is seamless, continuous and connected to their strategic goals. This enforces best practices in process execution, keeps undesired deviations at bay and provides an opportunity to evolve existing process best practices into innovative “next practices".
To achieve optimal process adherence, two approaches are used; process compliance and process conformance.
- Process Compliance refers to ensuring regulations and industry standards are met. Some of them are optional but they are important quality indicators for any organization (e.g. ISO9001). Others are industry specific (e.g. ANSI product certifications) and some are general laws (e.g. GDPR) or, industry specific laws (e.g. HIPAA). In some cases, non-compliance can result in severe penalties or even imprisonment for leaders. Other standards might be related to SLAs that companies promise to their customers (e.g. max delivery times) or even internal business rules (e.g. do a credit check in case an order has a volume higher than 100k) and policies (e.g. hotel cost restrictions per country) that are highlighted in employee guidelines. All of these regulations are usually written down in lengthy documents, but it presents a challenge when trying to express the concrete rules through process intelligence software in order to monitor their compliance. Existing concepts are too restrictive and only allow for a small fraction of what would be required, and encoding even those require heavy technical expert knowledge.
- Process Conformance ensures that a process is executed in reality as it was designed. Conformance checking is a process adherence technique that compares actual execution data (i.e. the event log) of a process to the should-be model of the same process and highlights the differences. Conformance checking can be used for process compliance however, a key challenge is the lack of flexibility of the designed process model. In reality, there are often many valid ways to execute a process. If all valid behavior were captured in the should-be process model, it would become too complex for humans to understand. The work around is dealing with long white lists, which are hard to maintain. In addition, and specifically when modeling and mining projects are driven by different groups of people, there is a strong disconnect between the system generated events (the event log) and the activities captured in the model. There is also a different level of granularity that is very challenging, if not impossible to resolve without significant rework in modeling.
- Process Adherence brings the elements of process mining, process modeling, process compliance and conformance together in a powerful way. Working with each piece in isolation puts the onus on the user to find insights, creating a longer time to value. However, because these elements are unified through process adherence, the most relevant insights for the organization are brought to the user. This revolutionary approach takes the complexity out of managing separate disciplines in order to enable the fastest and most seamless value journey possible.
