Why should you combine Business Process Management and process mining?
There are countless blog posts out there that will sing the praises of both Business Process Management (BPM) and process mining, individually. But here’s the deal: combining both technologies unlocks a completely new set of possibilities.
Traditionally, BPM focuses on process modeling. There are multiple forms that the modeling could take, such as a BPMN process model, an overarching process landscape with process groupings and the sub-processes within them, a customer journey map, or even an org chart.
These models are used as part of ongoing business transformation and process excellence efforts. They serve as a starting point to help understand current processes, which can help your teams understand what needs to change and thus conceptualize (and model) the future ideal-state process.
Plus, those models can include details about legal requirements, company policy, and stakeholders. Additionally, BPM process models can be created on different hierarchical levels, allowing for documentation of top-level company strategy and how it maps to low-level activities, effectively linking strategy to execution.
But those models can’t tell you what your processes currently look like in the real world.
On the other hand, process mining is fantastic at telling you how your processes currently run, where there are bottlenecks, and which root causes you should tackle to improve them. In short: process mining is a great tool for measuring your performance and comparing it to targets. But process mining struggles to say what the ideal future should look like.
The best of both worlds
So: process mining is perfect for developing an objective starting baseline of how your processes operate today, while process modeling is useful for designing an ideal future-state process.
Bring these technologies together, and you get a new level of end-to-end transparency, and a clear roadmap to reach your targets.