When processes work well, organizations can execute at their full capacity. As businesses change and grow however, processes get more complex, more prone to bottlenecks and breakdowns. Those process pain points keep businesses from running at peak performance. They also present an opportunity.
Process mining enables organizations to find and capture the value opportunities that hide in their processes. Opportunities to find invoices that were paid twice or goods that were shipped but not billed for. For years, businesses across industries have used process mining to drive cash value, manage costs and improve customer satisfaction.
Before process mining technology, creating a process model was a manual affair. People got together in rooms and mapped out what they thought a process looked like using sticky notes and whiteboards. They conducted interviews with process leads, stakeholders and end users. This was traditional process discovery and analysis as practiced in the world of Business Process Management (BPM). It was time-consuming, expensive and often produced models that reflected how people thought a process worked instead of how it actually worked. Process mining changed everything.
Process mining allows companies to pull event data from the information systems that run modern business operations, such as ERP, CRM and SCM. The data is stored in event logs and analyzed to create an unbiased view of how processes actually run, not how people think they run.
In describing how process mining transformed BPM research and application, Prof. Wil van der Aalst, Chief Scientist at Celonis and the person who coined the term process mining, wrote that it was “no longer acceptable to waste time and money on creating BPMN [business process management and notation] models that say little about the actual processes.”
According to van der Aalst, process mining was initially used with a data science mindset to perform process analysis for a specific improvement project. “Celonis was the first process mining vendor that enabled non-experts to use process mining results continuously,” he wrote.
Since then, process mining, especially when combined with the automation functionality and consumer-grade user experience in Celonis EMS, has become the solution for driving rapid business value.
According to Gartner, “by 2025, 80% of organizations driven by the expectations of cost reduction and automation-derived enhanced process efficiency will embed process mining capabilities in at least 10% of their business operations.” Driving this adoption are macroeconomic conditions such as supply chain disruption and inflation, accelerated digital transformation efforts, and increasing demands for operational excellence and resilience.
The use cases for process mining across the business are many:
- Procurement - By leveraging process mining, procurement teams can better enforce contract compliance and usage, reduce late deliveries, improve the touchless order rate, more easily match free-text requisitions to past POs and reduce maverick buying.
- Accounts Payable (AP or A/P) - With process mining, AP teams can prevent duplicate invoice payments, minimize payment term mismatches, maximize cash discount utilization, minimize payment blocks and prevent currency mismatches.
- Accounts Receivable (AP or A/P) - AR teams can use process mining to ensure on-time payment, increase touchless collections, track payment term compliance, prevent underpayments and improve credit utilization.
- Inventory Management - Process mining can accelerate key inventory management initiatives such as reducing excess and obsolescence, speeding up inventory turnover, reducing the risk of shortages and ensuring on-time deliveries.
- Order Management - Process mining is used by order management teams to minimize credit holds, prevent late deliveries, prevent order rejections, cut down on manual work by increasing touchless orders and reduce the number of unbilled orders.
