Process management involves the activities of planning, implementing, monitoring, and improving an organization’s business processes. A crucial aspect of successful process management is having an accurate understanding of the current state of processes and identifying opportunities for improvement. This is where process mining comes into play.
Process mining automatically discovers the actual flow of processes by analyzing event logs from an organization’s information systems. This provides process managers with an objective and data-driven understanding of how their processes truly operate. This level of transparency, often difficult to achieve with traditional methods, forms a vital foundation for process management efforts.
Process mining offers valuable insights at every stage of the process management lifecycle. In the planning phase, it helps understand existing processes and define improvement goals. During implementation, it’s used to monitor whether processes are running according to plan and to identify deviations. In the monitoring phase, it’s a powerful tool for measuring process performance and identifying bottlenecks or inefficiencies. And in the improvement phase, it provides concrete recommendations for changes and optimizations based on the analysis results.
For example, process mining can reveal the root causes of delays in an order process, identify unnecessary steps in an approval workflow, or highlight redundancies in a customer service process. This information provides valuable input for making processes more efficient, effective, and customer-centric.
In conclusion, process mining and process management are two disciplines that complement and strengthen each other. Process mining provides the real-time and evidence-based information needed for effective process management, enabling more informed decisions and more successful improvement projects.
