Process Mining has sparked a better way to approach business improvement. If your role touches business processes in any way, you will want to know more.
Recently I’ve been meeting with a lot of people in the industry and I always ask them: “have you heard of process mining?” I would say 95% of people have never heard of it. The 5% that have, don’t know much about it. That’s not unusual because it is a relatively new space in the industry that hasn’t “taken off” – yet.
Gartner predicts process mining will explode over the next few years. And why wouldn’t it? If someone has invented a tool to do something faster, with less effort, more cost effectively, and with a better result – why wouldn’t you want to use it too?
It means, in the near future, every company wanting to do process improvement, RPA, digital-transformation, an ERP or legacy system upgrade or replacement – will use a process mining tool.
Where did Process Mining come from?
Process Mining was invented around 2002 in a Dutch university (The Eindhoven University of Technology). In it’s early days it was known as ABPD which stands for Automated Business Process Discovery. Originally people thought that it was just a neat way to draw the process chart. I mention this because I think it’s important to understand the evolution of thought around what the technology does.
As the technology has improved, ABPD has been replaced with the term Process Mining (a mashup of data mining and business process), and more recently as Process Intelligence (a mashup of business intelligence and business process).
This is a good evolution, but we think it hasn’t finished yet. We at Arkturus firmly believe that the future of Process Mining is the Enterprise Digital Twin, i.e. a single, central system that accesses data from an organisation’s systems. It will provide a single source of information, KPIs, measures, reporting, and the single place to monitor, measure, audit, comply.
Think Starship Enterprise ship’s computer, think Hal-9000 (but without the homicidal tendencies).
How Process Mining works
In a nutshell, we take data from your systems and run it through our algorithms and put it into our temporal event based model, and we form a complete, detailed intimate knowledge of your business process. It’s fast, 100% accurate and highly accessible to the average business person.
The immediate application of this knowledge is visualising the business process and drawing a process diagram, and then applying it to process improvement. Our Process Mining application has analytical tools to allow you to slice and dice, drill down into the process diagram, develop interactive charts etc.
But we can do more than this. Our model is not simply a data warehouse or data lake – it’s not just a dumb store of data where you have to build the intelligence on top of it with programming and reporting. On top of this model we can provide you with the ability to do things in minutes and without code – that you would normally have to spend time and money getting a technical person to program for you.
The benefits Process Mining delivers
Traditionally, trying to capture how your business processes work relies heavily on user perception or qualitative information. But by basing everything on the system data through Process Mining, we provide a fact based foundation to your process activities.
The result is a complete picture of what goes on in your business, not one based purely on what people say. Analytical features within the tool allow you to evaluate the impact and root cause analysis interactively, and that takes less time, less resource and leads to a better result.
As is the intent of most tools, Arkturus allows you to do more with less.
You can do more analysis in less time. More improvement projects with less resources. More data analysis with less technical resource cost. More insights in less time. I’m sure you get the picture.
Continuous process improvement
Looking past the initial improvement project, Arkturus provides the ability to do real ongoing monitoring and management of your business processes. It includes establishing a codeless KPI bank and dashboard, with an early warning detection system for compliance violations.
Once again you can achieve more with less. More KPIs and metrics for less time and cost coding and reporting. Delivery to customised dashboards for anyone who needs the information for no additional cost. More relevant information for your users for less cost.
Furthermore, process mining process charts are living documents – that means they are up to date with reality. No longer are they immediately out of date as soon as they are drawn, as is common in organisations, even for those using a BPM tool. Imagine that – always being able to know accurately what goes on in your business processes, and not just “what should be going on”, or “what should be going on as of six months ago”.
