Your business runs on processes, so improving them will bring immense value to your business. Whether you’re looking to boost compliance, reduce the cost of business operations, or deliver an incredible customer experience, it all starts with process improvement.
But even if you have a strong business process management discipline, you may still not have enough insight into everything that occurs within your processes. This is especially true if you’re solely capturing data and knowledge from your employees. While their input is valuable, this method is full of gaps and human bias and cannot stand alone. That’s where process mining can help.
What is Process Mining?
What is Process Mining: 60 Second Recap
Process mining works with your systems’ data to map out every step within your processes, from who’s involved and how long it takes to deviate from the norm. This technology can precisely pinpoint where your process bottlenecks and inefficiencies are AND offer ideas for automation opportunities. It then creates process models for the process flow you’re looking to improve so you can easily visualize your current state and where you want to be. Process mining not only provides value itself, but it also helps you determine what other technologies and existing processes are worth your time and financial investment.
Let’s dive into the top 10 benefits of process mining.
10 Benefits of Process Mining
1. Make Data-Driven Decisions
To make data-driven decisions, you need:
- Data availability
- Relevancy
- High-quality data
- Comprehensive data visualization
- Analytics capabilities
Unfortunately, most organizations don’t have everything they need to make good data-driven decisions. Process mining provides all these capabilities by using your raw data or event logs to extract the true process sequence and close data gaps As a result, this tool unlocks accurate, unbiased insights into everything that occurs in your end-to-end processes so you can make more informed decisions.
2. Save Money and Time Through Targeted Automation
Process mining helps you zero in on the tasks within your processes that will benefit most from automation, allowing you to spend your time and money as efficiently as possible. And when you automate these processes, you save time through better productivity, save money by removing unnecessary steps and eliminating human error, and improve your employees’ work lives.
3. Gain Transparency and Justification for Your Digital Transformation Goals
You understand the value and urgency of digital transformation, but your decision-makers may not. That’s why process mining is such a powerful ally in your quest to get executive buy-in and employee approval. Executives are constantly being pulled in every direction, so it can be tough to help them understand why your initiative is worth their time. Additionally, employees are often content with “the old way of doing things,” and the prospect of change can be scary. This technology uses data to help executives and employees visualize how current systems and processes are chipping away at valuable money, time, work-life quality, and company reputation. It also showcases the immense value digital transformation will bring.
4. Gain a Comprehensive Understanding of Your Processes As-Is
To make a wise technology investment, you need to have a clear vision of your goals and a solid grasp of your current state. Process mining can help you understand the ins and outs of your current processes , which allows you to:
- Know whether it’s worth investing in an improvement.
- Pinpoint where your most significant problems exist.
- Understand how much variation exists in the processes across your organization.
Better yet, process mining helps you gain this understanding far faster than any employee could and without human bias or error.
5. Improve Process Performance Management
Process mining tools can automate the data collection of process and employee performance management, ensuring that these jobs get done without bias or human error. As a result, it enables you to continuously monitor KPIs like Time to Resolution, First Time Right, SLA, and others. Keeping close tabs on this data means that you can improve processes as you go. Plus, process mining can access historical process data to produce insights on the parameters that impact KPI measures, detect ideal processes, and improve the deviants.
6. Boost Customer Satisfaction
When you use process mining to optimize customer processes, you can create more seamless, intuitive, and innovative experiences that increase customer loyalty and expand your customer base.
Process mining tools also allow you to constantly monitor your processes, which enables you to react to problems faster. If an issue arises, the technology can determine its cause quickly so your team can address it. In addition, by putting out fires faster, you can prevent them from escalating, which improves the customer experience and your overall company performance.
7. Identify and Resolve Process Bottlenecks
One of the biggest benefits of process mining is its ability to eliminate even the most stubborn, hidden bottlenecks. Many organizations have bottlenecks in their processes that cause significant slowdowns, but without process mining tools, these obstacles are invisible. Process mining allows you to analyze every process step in detail, revealing hidden bottlenecks that can be solved with automation.
8. Reduce Risk and Increase Compliance
Process mining helps auditors analyze data faster and enables you to predict where compliance issues and risk factors are likely to exist. Since process mining gives you complete insights into your processes, you get a clearer picture of potential problem areas. Plus, when you know where issues are likely to occur, it’s easier to fill in the gaps and keep watch to prevent expensive fines or damaging attacks. Process mining also makes it quick and easy to build dashboards and alarms that identify real-time compliance issues.
9. Standardize Processes and Streamline Business Outcomes
Processes are typically more complex than a company can predefine. When you bring process mining in, it can detect non-standard procedures down to minute detail. System logs that document your actual processes act as sources to record the differences between actual and idealized processes. As a result, companies can understand the urgency or quality issues in each process and make improvements accordingly. This is a massive gain because manually analyzing system logs can be highly error-prone and time-consuming.
10. Continuous Improvement
There is no limit to how frequently you can apply process mining tools to your processes. It’s not just a one-off benefit. Whether you’re aiming to determine your current state while you’re optimizing a process, or performing a pulse check post-implementation, process mining can add real value over time.
Adding Intelligent Automation to Your Digital Transformation
Your Ticket to Continuous Improvement
Many organizations don’t often think about process performance until something goes wrong. But that’s not the right time to focus on process improvement. Taking a continuous approach to process improvement allows you to avoid problems instead of reacting to them after the damage has been done. Process mining is your best bet, allowing you to achieve lasting process efficiency. It provides the transparency and justification necessary to drive the change your organization needs. And when you fix bottlenecks in your end-to-end processes, you can offer more value for your customers and employees.
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