Process Mining: The advantages of dynamic process analysis

In this age of technological advancement, the possibilities of AI and automation to revolutionize businesses are unparalleled. Yet, many businesses still find themselves in the dark when it comes to understanding their own workflows and uncovering vital areas for process optimization. 

As a result, the integration of AI and automation can often fall short and fail to deliver the cost savings and efficiency gains that businesses expect. This is where Process Mining software can help give your business a clear advantage. 

By harnessing the event data stored in your information systems, Process Mining provides invaluable insights about how your business operations actually function. Armed with this knowledge, your teams can then confidently implement optimizations and validate their impact, ensuring impressive results.

Recently there has been a steady climb in the popularity of Process Mining tools and this is projected to continue to only grow. In fact, according to a Fortune Business Insights study, the global Process Mining software market size is projected to reach $27.72 billion by 2030.

What is Process Mining?

By connecting detailed event data with broader business outcomes, Process Mining has the potential to unlock transformative advantages for businesses in various sectors. Here are five key benefits that Process Mining offers:

1. Enable decision-making with data-led insights

Data-driven decision-making is vital in today's high stakes business landscape. However, several factors including data availability, relevancy and quality can stand in the way of companies making well-informed decisions.

Luckily, this is where Process mining can help. With a few simple clicks, your teams can leverage Process Mining to visualize your workflows by consolidating data from  across different IT systems. This streamlines your business operations by enabling faster decision-making while reducing the need for guesswork. 

Furthermore, Process Mining can also assist in detecting and resolving data quality problems that may have been overlooked during manual reviews. These problems include incorrect order types, vacant form fields, and missing master data. 

By doing so, it guarantees that your team makes the right decisions based on comprehensive and reliable information, leading to the most favorable outcomes.

2. Monitor your business operations performance

Process mining offers more than just a temporary solution to current bottlenecks in your business operations. It also plays a crucial role in your firm's ongoing business process management. 

By continuously tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), Process Mining enables your team to benchmark current processes against similar past initiatives. This helps to foster continuous improvement and ensure your businesses’ long term success. 

Likewise, this also assists your team with detecting future deviations in your business operations before they become a serious problem.

3. Standardize your processes

Another great benefit of Process Mining is how it can assist with standardizing processes. It accomplishes this by combing through your process data and generating a detailed process model. The model describes your processes as-is instead of how they are intended to work ideally.

This process model will be able to illustrate the deviations, workarounds, exceptions, inter-process conflicts, and bottlenecks that may be hidden within your processes without the potential of human bias affecting the findings.

Once inefficiencies have been identified and analyzed, your teams can then focus on how to streamline your workflows. For instance, eliminating legacy process steps that might be redundant or unnecessarily complex can lead to better cost savings. 

Standardizing your processes also leads to numerous knock-on effects including making it easier to train new employees and automate processes.

4. Enhance your customer experience

Mapping out your customer journey is a key step to understanding what motivates your customers and how they interact with your company.  However, the insights you have can be limited unless you are able to leverage all your available data sources. This is where Process Mining tools enable a holistic understanding of customer behavior across various channels.

With Process Mining, your teams can swiftly uncover recurring patterns in customer behavior and understand how to best serve their needs. Subsequently, they can pinpoint critical areas that can be enhanced to create a more intuitive customer experience and foster lasting engagement.

With access to real-time customer insights, your teams can also react more quickly when customer problems arise and recover frustrated customers before they churn. Essentially, harnessing the power of Process Mining can enhance the customer journey so that every interaction is seamless and engaging.

5. Minimize compliance risk

Compliance risk is a serious concern for organizations of all sizes. It can lead to costly financial losses and severe legal penalties if businesses fail to adhere to laws and regulations. As such, all organizations should have an efficient and accurate process to obtain a full audit trail to protect themselves.

This is where Process Mining can help auditors quickly analyze their end-to-end processes and highlight potential compliance risks while keeping auditing costs low. Following this, management teams can then take the necessary measures to resolve any issues before they pose a danger. 

By leveraging Process Mining, organizations can also ensure that they stay up to date with industry regulations and internal policies. 

Unlocking the full benefits of Process Mining

While Process Mining tools can be an amazing tool to unveil objective data-led insights about your business operations, it is only one half of the optimization puzzle. This is where Intelligent Automation (IA) can be used to leverage those insights and help businesses work smarter.

Discover more about the various benefits of augmenting your human teams with the unique cognitive capabilities of IA in our latest article: 5 ways intelligent automation can benefit your business

Make sure to also grab a copy of our comprehensive IA guide to learn how IA can help you optimize and scale your business decision making.