Your ticket to process improvement: Process Mining For Dummies, Celonis Special 2nd Edition

You probably follow a series of steps that goes something like: soap it up, rinse it off, wipe it down, then take on the inside if you’ve got the patience. But let’s say you glance across the street and find yourself mesmerized at how your neighbor’s car catches the light. It’s a sight to behold, and puts yours to shame. How can you get your car looking more like that, you wonder. Perhaps soaping it for longer, giving it a second wipe, or recruiting another pair of hands would do the trick.

But perhaps it won’t. The only way you’re certain to uncover how to make your car the envy of the street is by taking a good long look at your car washing process. Business processes are no different. Just substitute neighborhood rivalries for enterprise competitiveness. Want to cement your position as market leader and make transformative technologies like artificial intelligence work for your business? You need to understand how your processes actually run, and therefore where your improvement opportunities lie.

This is what process mining was put on this earth to do.

Process mining models and analyzes how your processes actually run – not how you think they run. It replaces guesswork and assumptions with transparency and objectivity, giving your teams the insights they need to make processes work, really work. It’s a lot for process mining pros, let alone newcomers, to keep up with. Which is why Process Mining For Dummies, Celonis Special 2nd Edition breaks down exactly how it all works.

In For Dummies’ trademark down-to-earth language, you’ll learn where process mining has come from, how to use it effectively, and why it’s something your business can’t do without. Here’s a flavor of what to expect:

1. Become fluent in process mining lingo

There are some terms to learn before you can get into the meat of process mining (in all its case-centric versus object-centric glory). First, you need to know your objects (such as a sales order or invoice) from your events (when an invoice is paid, for instance). Then there are timestamps (records of when an event occurred) versus event logs (which collate multiple timestamped objects). All of these terms play a role in understanding the steps involved in a process.

• Free download: Process Mining For Dummies, Celonis Special 2nd Edition

2. Tips for getting started with process mining

Help yourself to proven best practices, like prioritizing the gathering and connecting of data to enable process mining. You’ll also learn how to avoid the pitfalls of “automating blind”: attempting a nifty shortcut by jumping straight to process automation, which risks simply embedding inefficiencies – the equivalent of scrubbing dirt into your car instead of rinsing off any debris before you begin. Other tips include establishing whether you’re embarking on a standalone project to gather insights about your processes, or whether you want to go all-in by embedding process mining within your wider systems and business intelligence platform.

• Watch: What is process mining?

3. Assess your process maturity and pick the right vendor

Speaking of getting started, pinpointing where your business is on the process maturity scale is an important step. The guide whittles it down to four stages: from developing process understanding to standardizing processes and optimizing processes, all the way up to innovating process improvement. Once you’ve established your position, you can match and tailor deployment to your organization’s maturity. And, to help with the formidable task of navigating the process mining market, the ebook lists the must-have capabilities and must-ask questions to put to vendors, such as what is the typical deployment time and is it possible to extract real-time data into the platform

4. Turn insights into targeted business improvement action

Adopting process mining is one thing. Making your processes work and getting tangible business value out of them is another. So Process Mining For Dummies will introduce you to process intelligence, the missing piece in the modern intelligence stack. Celonis Process Intelligence takes process mining’s bedrock of visibility, then layers in artificial intelligence, automation, and standardized process knowledge to recommend optimizations and put them to work.

• Check out how PepsiCo used Celonis Process Intelligence to free up millions in working capital

5. Explore real process mining use cases

The guide takes you on the process mining greatest hits tour with some of its finest use cases from the worlds of Order-to-Cash and Purchase-to-Pay, through back-office and IT operations, and on to industry-specific benefits, like preventing thousands of appointment cancellations for a national healthcare service. From improving on-time delivery rates to accelerating customer service resolution times – your core functions and day-to-day KPIs are all featured. And strategic initiatives aren’t left out either – you’ll also find out how process mining supports digital transformation and sustainability.