Five process discovery methods to unveil the potential of your organization

Improving core business processes can help organizations achieve a variety of goals, from cutting costs and optimizing working capital to meeting their customers’ changing needs and making the most of emerging AI-powered technologies.

But before businesses can begin to improve their processes they first have to understand how those processes currently run. Almost 80% of business leaders feel they urgently need to better understand their processes to make the most of the opportunities in front of them, according to our Process Optimization Report. What’s more, 89% say AI needs process understanding if it’s going to be effectively deployed in their business.

Gaining this process understanding requires some form of process discovery. In this article, we’ll take a look at five business process discovery methods, spanning both manual and automated process discovery, that can be used to unveil the potential within your organization.

Manual process discovery techniques

Manual process discovery techniques rely on people’s knowledge of how a business process works. These people are usually stakeholders that are involved in or impacted by the process, so they should have first-hand experience of how it works. However, their perceptions tend to be subjective and are often inaccurate. So manual process discovery techniques should never be used in isolation, they should always be used alongside data-based techniques.

Two common manual process discovery methods are basic process mapping and rapid process discovery.

1 - Basic process mapping

A process map is simply a visual representation of a business process, showing how the work happens, or at least how it’s supposed to. There are various types of process maps that businesses can use to document their processes, but they tend to share a set of common symbols that anyone inside or outside the organization can understand.

Process mapping is a time-consuming endeavor that relies on the process analyst conducting interviews with the individual stakeholders involved in the existing process, or in-person workshops with larger teams. Their perceptions of how the current process works are recorded – either using whiteboards and sticky notes or the latest process mapping tools – and compiled into a process model or map.

• Find out how Celonis saved A.O. Smith thousands of hours of internal process mapping workshops.

While basic process mapping can help guide high-level decision making around a core business process, it has many limitations. For example, it’s often inaccurate because it relies on subjective opinions. It also only captures a business process at a particular point in time, meaning it’s quickly outdated and can’t be used for continuous discovery. And it rarely captures all the various paths a process actually takes in reality, so the resulting process model or process definition document is invariably incomplete.

2 - Rapid process discovery

Rapid process discovery is a form of process mapping. It is a specific capability within some process discovery tools, designed to speed up business process management.

Instead of the in-person workshops and interviews used in more traditional process mapping, rapid process discovery allows the stakeholders involved in the process to complete a digital form for each activity, or step of the process that they have knowledge of. The insights from these digital forms then feed into a process map or process model.

As the name suggests, rapid process mining should deliver results more quickly than basic process mapping. This is because workshops and interviews don’t need to be scheduled and stakeholders can complete the digital survey forms whenever they have time. However, this process discovery method is just as subjective as process mapping, and shares many of the same drawbacks. It also lacks the clarification potential of workshops and interviews that basic process mapping has.

ing the parts of the process that don’t occur within transactional systems.

Automated process discovery methods

Automated process discovery is a more objective approach to understanding how a business process runs and driving process improvement. Rather than relying on people’s perceptions, automated process discovery tools extract data directly from business systems to deliver an accurate, real-time view of process flows.

Here we explore process mining, Object-Centric Process Mining, and task mining, which are all automated business process discovery methods.

1 - Process mining

Process mining was invented in 2011, the year the Process Mining Manifesto was authored by Professor Wil van der Aalst and the other founding members of the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining. The technology is rapidly gaining traction, with 91% of business leaders saying they are already using process mining tools, or plan to in the next 12 months.

Process mining extracts event log data from an enterprise’s transactional systems – like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM) applications – to create a real-time visualization of how a business process actually runs, in all its different variations. Process mining has a number of benefits:

• It provides objective, fact-based, actionable insights that can be used to improve business processes, often through process automation.
• It is far more accurate than process mapping, and delivers valuable insights more quickly. It is often cheaper too.
• It works on top of existing business systems, so businesses can create a process model from the technologies they already have.

• Learn about process mining from Professor Wil van der Aalst

2 - Object-Centric Process Mining

Process mining technology is evolving quickly, and Object-Centric Process Mining, or OCPM, is its latest iteration. It takes process mining to the next level by enabling businesses to explore the complex relationship between processes, and helps them find value opportunities where those processes intersect. OCPM allows enterprises to create a full digital twin of their business processes and understand how any change in one part of the business will impact other functions and departments.

As explained in the Everest report, The Evolution of Process Mining:

“An object-based approach helps shift from a 2D to 3D visualization of the process. It can capture real-life objects and events in the way process owners describe them. This provides enterprises with an end-to-end process view for identifying any hidden inefficiencies within and between end-to-end business processes.”

3 - Task mining

Task mining is different from process mining because, instead of extracting data from transactional systems, it captures data from desktop interactions to see how work is executed. Task mining can capture interactions like:

• Checking a spreadsheet
• Copying and pasting data
• Opening an email
• Searching in a web browser

By analyzing how the user is working, task mining can help to find efficiencies and improvements to increase productivity and enhance the employee experience. Task mining can be used alongside process mining, and can add additional insight to process models by capturing the parts of the process that don’t occur within transactional systems.

Combining the best process discovery methods

Combining the latest automated process discovery methods, including OCPM and task mining, Celonis can create a Process Intelligence Graph, or digital process twin for your enterprise. We then layer in artificial intelligence and a decade of standardized process knowledge to give you the Process Intelligence you need to understand your processes, find improvement opportunities, and unlock real business value.

• Find out how Cardinal Health expanded Process Intelligence from a single use case in order management to the entire enterprise.
• See how Celonis is named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Process Mining Platforms.
• Register for an Introduction to Celonis Process Mining Demo.