Business processes are the lifeblood of a company. There’s a process behind everything an organization does: buying, selling, paying, collecting, shipping, and so on. When these processes run better, your business runs better.
Start for freeMore and more, industry leaders are realizing that superior processes are a competitive differentiator. So it’s no surprise that investments in process improvement tools and initiatives are skyrocketing. This is especially true for process mining technology, which has grown from a $90 million market in 2018 to a $340 million one in 2020, according to the Everest Group.
Process mining creates an “X-ray” of a business process that helps you gain visibility and identify inefficiencies in core operations. Process mining tools have quickly become the backbone of many companies’ efforts to streamline and optimize processes.
Since the rise of databases and transactional systems like ERPs, companies have invested in digitizing processes and optimizing them to run more efficiently.
And yet, most companies’ processes aren’t performing to their full potential. Just look at the average process performance against best-in-class benchmarks:
These four processes are very different — as are the systems, data, and people behind them. But they have one thing in common: the way these processes are executed has a direct impact on critical business outcomes. When these processes run efficiently, goods get to customers on time, orders are processed faster, operational costs are minimized, and working capital gets freed up.
In most cases, companies have outlined the way that these processes should run in an ideal world. But the way they actually run in the real world... can be a very different story.
The problem is many organizations aren’t able to see and understand what’s happening in these processes on a day-to-day basis, so they can’t identify the difference between the process “as is” and “as expected.”
And as they say, you can’t fix what you can’t see.
Now that you know how process mining works, it’s time to move from simply understanding processes to improving them.
Once you’ve used process mining to gain visibility into a process, you can start to ask questions like:
Where do we need to change activities or steps?
Which activities could potentially be automated?
How do we need to redesign the process?
Which actions will drive better outcomes?
You’ll get the most value out of process mining by using it as part of a larger set of tools and initiatives for improving overall business execution.
Reduce time
Cut cost
Lower the amount of investment required to operate the process
Minimize waste
Reduce the amount of resources consumed by the process
Improve quality
Increase the total value delivered by a process
Standardization
Reduce variations to ensure that processes are being executed in the same way across the organization
Streamlining
Reduce the number and complexity of the steps in a process
Optimization
Adjust the process to optimize it for a certain KPI
Automation
Reduce the amount of human effort by automating steps and actions within a process workflow
Ready to get started with process mining? Start with the Celonis free plan.
Here it is. Everything you need to know about process mining in a single book, written in the easy to understand, hard to forget style ‘For Dummies’ manage so effortlessly.