Six questions to ask when choosing process discovery tools to document your business processes

Business process discovery tools have come a long way in the last decade. They’ve evolved from manual process mapping tools – which rely on people’s perception of how processes worked and are unreliable when used in isolation – to fully automated business process discovery tools that often form part of wider process mining platforms. Today, automated process discovery tools allow businesses to visualize their processes by extracting data from the event logs that are readily available in information systems.

However, there are still significant differences between the various process discovery tools available to enterprises. And the business process management market is evolving quickly. As explained in the latest Everest Group Process Mining Products PEAK Matrix®:

“Leaders continue to invest in newer and innovative capabilities including generative AI-based chat interfaces for faster time-to-insights, Object-centric Process Mining (OCPM) for parallel behavior detection, and prescriptive insights to take relevant actions. Leaders are focusing on forging partnerships with or developing in-house capabilities for complementary technologies such as task mining, RPA, IDP and process orchestration.”

Here are six questions to ask technology vendors before you commit to a process discovery tool, to make sure you’re getting the functionality you need to realize value from your business processes:

1 - Does the tool have process set-up and data preparation capabilities?

Most automated process discovery tools will be able to extract data from event logs in your transactional systems. But you’ll also want to ensure they have the capabilities to prepare that data effectively.

Are they able to clean and transform event log data, or provide step-by-step guidance for data clean-up? Are they able to ingest data from event logs in near real time and merge event logs from different systems to create a process model? Can they improve process discovery by supplementing event logs with data from IoT devices, and can they configure case IDs, resources and specific attributes in event log data?

2 - Can the tool be easily integrated with my existing systems?

You won’t want to rip and replace your existing systems to enable process visibility. Process discovery tools (and broader process mining technologies) should sit on top of your existing systems, helping you get the most from your technology investments. Before you commit to any process discovery tool, you’ll want to make sure it’s interoperable with the systems you currently use, or any systems you may want to use in the future.

Ideally, a process discovery tool will have pre-built connectors for applications from major providers like Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and more. It should also be able to support a variety of operating systems including Windows, Linux, and Mac. Your process discovery tool should be able to integrate with third-party tools through REST or SOAP web services, and to access all platform functionalities through open APIs.

3 - Can the process discovery tool be used with complementary capabilities?

Process discovery tools are most effective at driving business value when they’re used alongside other, complementary capabilities. Three examples of these capabilities include:

Task mining

Some process steps – like sending an email or updating a spreadsheet – don’t take place in the transactional systems used in automated process discovery. By combining process discovery with task mining, desktop data can be used for task capture and can be combined with event log data to deliver a more granular view of how work gets done.

Business intelligence

Business intelligence transforms business data into a useful, user-friendly foundation for strategic decision-making. The ability to combine it with process insights from process discovery gives organizations a clear understanding of how processes can be improved to address any concerns identified in BI analytics.

Robotic Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, uses bots to automate repetitive, rules-based tasks. Getting the most out of any automation effort requires process visibility, so RPA deployments can be shaped and reshaped as processes inevitably adapt to a changing environment. The insights from process discovery can help to reveal automation opportunities and are a solid foundation for a successful RPA implementation.

4 - Does the tool analyze discrete or interconnected processes?

Automated process discovery analyzes both the objects and events that make up an existing process. Objects are the individual items that are processed, like sales orders or purchase orders, and events are the process steps that apply to those objects, like approvals, changes or status updates.

Traditional approaches to automated process discovery will analyze a single business process that takes place largely within a specific department or function, like Order-to-Cash in Order Management. However, newer developments in business process discovery, like object-centric exploration, allow you to visualize and analyze the relationships between objects and events across interconnected processes – ultimately providing a three-dimensional view of the entire business.

By illuminating the complex ways in which multiple objects and events in your systems interact, you can find value opportunities not just within but also between processes. You can look upstream to understand what’s happening, and zero in on the root cause of downstream issues. You might, for instance, find that procurement problems are affecting sales order fulfillment, or that changes in sales orders are having a knock-on impact on invoicing.

• Find out how German sealing specialist Freudenberg is able to not only see material shortages and their impact on downstream production processes in real time, but also understand the indirect dependencies on procurement and sales, using the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform.

5 - How easy is the process discovery tool to use?

Any business process discovery tool should help you find value opportunities within and across your processes, without the need for extensive technical expertise. It should have an intuitive user interface ideally with drag-and-drop functionality.

While the tool may have some out-of-the-box dashboards for process visualization, it should also enable you to create customized dashboards to meet your specific business requirements, and should allow you to export dashboards and insights via presentation tools.

It should encourage an exploratory approach to process discovery that doesn’t just reveal how processes are running, but enables you to dig down into the root causes of any issues, with embedded visualizations of the data to help understand what is happening. A process discovery tool should be able to integrate bespoke KPIs, and monitor processes in near real time against these KPIs.

• Find out how Celonis Studio makes building apps, dashboards and actions easier than ever

6 - Will the solution tell me how to fix my processes?

While automated process discovery tools will show you how your processes run and interact – and even where value opportunities might be found – they’re unlikely to provide recommendations for process improvement without additional functionality.

Process discovery tools should be combined with a process mining solution that can define a baseline model of the ideal process. A process mining tool can then compare processes against this model to see how they deviate, surface the factors that are causing these deviations, and suggest actions you can take to capture value, like applying intelligent automation.

Identifying process variations you didn’t know existed and getting recommendations on what to fix will require more than process discovery methods. Look for a process mining tool with process discovery capabilities to drive process optimization and continuous improvement.

• Read our process mining guide to find out more.

Advanced process discovery with Celonis

Of course there are many other things to consider when choosing a process discovery tool: Is it compliant with industry security standards, for instance, and what are the options for licensing? What level of product training and support can you expect, and how will the technology be hosted?

The Everest Group Process Mining Products PEAK Matrix® is a great resource to help inform your decision as it compares process mining tools based on a variety of capabilities including their process discovery offerings.

It lists a handful of the process discovery capabilities of the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform:

• The ability to create BPMN 2.0-compliant process models
• The ability to detect exceptions (failed transactions) in the process
• The ability to detect anomalies / fraudulent transactions in a process
• The ability to merge two or more process models
• The ability to generate detailed process documentation for discovered processes
• The availability of an indicator to display the complexity of a discovered process
• Object-centric Process Mining (OCPM) to detect parallel behavior in a process
• The ability to discover customer journey maps by mining customer interactions
• Out-of-the-box dashboards to assess the rework percentage for identified process loops
• The ability to discover organization-level relationships / social networks

Process analysis is a core, best-in-class capability of the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform. Once you’ve used OCPM to create a process digital twin, the platform brings together solutions to discover and visualize as-is processes, and analyse process-specific KPIs, giving you a true representation of your end-to-end processes that enables you to visualize the interconnectedness of your operations.

Discover more about the process analysis capabilities of the Celonis platform.