About Process Mining

What is Process Mining

Process Mining is a process analysis method to get process insights from data in IT systems. Instead of doing workshops to create an idealized picture of a process, Process Mining is a fact-based technique to show the exact process as it occurred in practice.

Process Mining provides answers to the operational and procedural challenges faced by organizations. It aims to improve business execution and customer engagement. The former refers to how internal business processes are carried out on an operational and tactical level. The latter refers to how organizations interact with their customers, as part of a predefined, internal business process.

Value

A process is a set of activities carried out in some order to reach a goal. It can also be described as a chain of events that leads to a specific result.

In short, it is a sequence of activities that can either add or decrease value. In the UiPath Process Mining vision, the business value is at the center of every process. It is something tangible that an organization can benefit from. It may be increasing turnover or profit, improving customer satisfaction, meeting compliance laws, encouraging contentedness in employees, etc.

A decrease in value can be work that is carried out incorrectly and must be done a second time. It can also be losing customers, not getting invoices paid on time, surplus inventory with high capital costs.

Understanding the actual “as is” state of a process is critical to knowing where problems exist and whether it is worth investing in improvements.

That’s where Process Mining can be used to detect issues like supply chain delays and understaffing earlier to increase efficiency. It combines data mining and model-based process analysis and therefore drives improvement of business performance factors, such as operational efficiency.

Process variations are easily discoverable, which leads to realizing best practices and complete alignment of processes.

Data

Many companies use Business Information Systems to collect, process, store and distribute information throughout your company. Among those you may find ERP, CRM, Accounting, BPM, diverse data bases and other tools.

This results in large amounts of data stored in your organization on who did what and when. Process mining makes it possible to use this big data to gain insights in unexpected business processes and find inefficiencies.

Process Mining tools

Systems log massive amounts of information; which Process Mining tools use, to compute models and display those as a process graph. The interactive visualization of processes greatly speeds up insight generation time. It lets you investigate what the process really was.

Every process mining tool makes different choices when filtering and visualizing the used data. This can have a great impact on the quality of the results.

UiPath Process Mining is a solution that provides a fast and easy method to be “in control” and improve your processes. Even though process mining was originally performed by technical data

analysts, UiPath Process Mining makes process mining available to business users. This way, everyone can benefit from the continuous insights in their processes, act fast to unwanted change and realize improvements.

Process Mining cycle

The following stages exist in a Process Mining cycle:

1. Data transformation: Collection of all your digital touchpoints from business information systems and transformation into event logs.
2. Process Analysis: Investigate your process to gain a deep understanding of which elements add or decrease value.
3. Continuous improvement: Continuous identification of fact-based opportunities to reduce operational risk, enhance performance, and deliver savings.