Increasing use of digital tools means an increasing amount of available data. Today, data is not only limited to websites, streaming services and mobile devices, but also within our business systems. We collate and manage data on customer behavior, internal operations and finances. With all of that bulk data at the organizations’ disposal, we need process mining to figuratively dig for that information. And make it valuable. Bottlenecks or consistent happy flows? Algorithms can expose the course of business processes. Perfect. But how do you use that data correctly? Time to dig deeper!
It is estimated that 463 exabytes of data will be created daily by 2025. That's 463 billion gigabytes per day. In other words, an enormous amount of data is created around business processes. While organizations focus on the customers, systems record all activities performed via a digital footprint - event logs. These are logs that record exactly what was done when in the system. Process mining then visualizes those logs to create insights. With these insights, you can work in a focused and efficient manner.
Too often, many managers base their decisions on a combination of intuition and incorrect or incomplete information. Process mining provides reliable insight into the course of a process. This allows you to implement entirely new processes in detail, correct inefficiencies and make better decisions. Your happy paths or bottlenecks are immediately visible, making it easy to present and improve complex processes.
Wondering how the throughput time of warehouse x differs from warehouse y? And which activity causes that difference? Or which product combinations run most efficiently through a sales-delivery process? With process mining, you’ll have the answer in no time.
Some examples where process mining is also used successfully:
Process improvement projects (Lean/six-sigma)
Determining transformation strategies based on facts
Business process management: mapping current processes in preparation for SAP S/4HANA transition
Measuring process compliance after completion of SAP S/4HANA transition
Creation of audit trails and risk analysis for audits
Continuous process monitoring in the process industry
Understanding the influences on the performance of KPI's
The main goal of an ERP migration is to make the organization future-proof. A new way of working is inevitable. Process mining can help you prepare. By documenting your processes, you can discover whether best practices are a good starting point or not. Then you can apply process analysis to keep up to the new standard.
Signavio pulls data from your source systems (such as ERP, WMS, CRM) and loads it into Signavio. At McCoy, we use standard connectors or develop our own solutions. The data is inspected, cleaned and converted into a real-time process flow, tailored to your organization. The tool analyzes not only the ideal process flow (happy flow), but also the bottlenecks and inefficiencies that deviate from the standard (sad flow - we made this one up, but it's quite apt). Regardless of the tool, process mining goes one step further. Both Signavio as well as ARIS not only give you insight into bottlenecks and inefficient processes, but they also show you how to do it better. With clear dashboards, you can now make improvements based on actual data.
To conclude. Will you go with process mining or BI? Both tools help managers make informed decisions. But the choice depends on the specific situation. BI can indicate that something is going wrong, while process mining shows why. So while BI primarily monitors and reports, process mining visualizes. In short, you can't replace one tool with the other. They can, however, perfectly complement each other.
Together with our team of certified process specialists, we strive to make process mining a success.