Business Process Mining
Most organizations today have complex processes that are hard to manage and control. Understanding the existing business processes is, however, the necessary starting point for process improvement.
A lot of data is available in the IT systems (e.g., in CRM, ERP, Workflow, PDM, ITSM, Home-made, or legacy systems, data warehouses or even Excel) that contain detailed information about which activities are performed, when, and by whom. What is needed are quick methods to gain insight in this data to understand the underlying processes and take actions.
Process mining can be used to quickly and objectively get a complete picture of the process by automatically analyzing the IT data and visualizing the real process flows that took place.
Benefits of Using Process Mining
Using process mining, you will be able to control and continuously improve your business processes.
Traditionally, to understand a process, people need to map out their processes manually, which is difficult and imprecise. Especially problem areas are not captured well enough in such a manual approach. Because process mining is based on objective IT records, the discovered process flows show a much more accurate picture of what is actually happening.
Furthermore, because process mining correlates and visualizes data from a process perspective, it
compliments classical dashboards by in-depth process analysis capabilities that are necessary for root cause analyses. In contrast to pre-configured reports, process mining allows for exploring the real processes (and getting new ideas for improvement opportunities) in a fact-based manner without upfront assumptions.
Some of your benefits of using process mining are:
• Understanding how the process is actually performed (complete overview, objective picture, more focused and evidence-based discussions).
• Improving the process flow by knowing the actual flows, frequencies, and delays in the process (decreasing variance and increasing efficiency; understanding where the bottlenecks are).
• Saving costs by improving the productivity of employees and reducing non-added-value activities.
• Decreasing risks by better role authorizations.
• Improving the quality of executed activities by identifying which cases were sent back (reducing overhead and improving the service level target for the overall process completion time).
• Controlling outsourced processes to understand what is happening there.
• Harmonizing processes in different regions (understand how people work in different ways to see what the best practices are and to align processes).
• Improving the quality and increasing the efficiency of auditing. Verify that prescribed processes are followed.
• Verifying that implemented process changes have had the expected effect by comparing the old process to the new process (objective comparison to see whether new is actually better, avoid that people slip back into old patterns)
more information please email uche: uanakwe@3consult-ng.com
