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What is Process Mining?

Are you new to process mining? Learn about its basics and
why so many businesses around the world have adopted it.

Process mining is a family of data-driven techniques to analyze business processes using event data extracted
from information systems. Process mining allows business users to identify bottlenecks, rework, deviations, and
sources of waste in their processes, and to discover opportunities to optimize performance and to maximize
positive business outcomes.

Over the past decade, process mining has become an essential business intelligence and business process
management toolset. Process mining is used in almost all industry sectors, including banking and financial
services, telecommunications, energy, healthcare, logistics and manufacturing.

Process mining applications allow analysts and  

managers to:

Understand how business operations are

executed by discovering “as-is” process
diagrams based on event data from an IT
system.
Analyze data to identify friction points in a
business process and relate these friction points
on key performance indicators.
Understand what makes the difference between
desirable and undesirable process outcomes, for
example between orders that are delivered on-
time versus orders that are delivered late.
Identify non-compliant behavior, understand the  
root causes of deviations, and quantify the
impact of these deviations on process  
performance.
Predict the future performance of a process
under different scenarios to make better
decisions and to prioritize their process
automation and process improvement efforts.

How does it work?

The process mining methodology is simple at its core: it’s about analyzing data from an enterprise system to
evaluate the efficiency, quality and conformance of process flows across an entire process.

The term process mining is an umbrella term for a combination of data mining and process management
techniques that use advanced algorithms, machine learning, and statistical methods to analyze event data in
order to shed light into business operations, all the way from end-to-end processes to individual process steps.
These so-called event logs are simply “log books” of information, collection of records and data.
Process mining uses data recorded in a company’s IT systems as a starting point to identify inefficiencies in
business processes, understand their root causes, and estimate their impact on key performance indicators.

Process mining complements other techniques for business analytics, such as data mining. Data mining is a set
of techniques to sift through raw data to find useful and pertinent patterns. Before the process mining begins,
data mining may be used to make sense of the data.

However, data mining does not provide an end-to-end view of the business process, including bottlenecks,
capacity constraints, and bottlenecks. This is because data mining techniques are not “process-aware”.

In contrast, process mining allows business users to extract visual process maps and models of their processes
from IT systems data, and to enhance these process maps and models to bring forward the inefficiencies,
sources of delay, rework, and defects, and other operational pain points that lead to inefficient processes.
Process mining additionally allow business users to become “compliance detectives” by surfacing out
deviations with respect to business rules and norms.

A common example of an end-to-end process is the “order-to-cash” (O2C) process, where customers buy goods
from a vendor. This process consists of process steps such as receiving a purchase order from a customer,
delivering the required products or services, issuing an invoice and clearing the payment. At first glance, this
process might look straightforward and linear. However, when applied to an O2C process, process mining shows
that the actual process is riddled with exceptions, compliance violations, inefficiencies, redundancies, and
rework loops, as well as numerous opportunities for process automation. You want to learn more about the
specifics of process mining? Go to our free online tutorial to dive into the capabilities of process mining
software.

 
Why process mining?
  Process mining is important because it leverages
event log data to identify trends, to optimize
performance and to make predictions under multiple
“what-if” scenarios.

If existing processes are inefficient, this leads to

frustrations, missed deadlines, poor compliance,
missed opportunities and a decrease in profits,
growth and overall morale. Process mining allows
analysts to discover how the new process model
should look like to address these friction points.

All companies generate data — but not all harness its

full potential. Process mining tools automate the
analysis of processes, to give you a factual picture of
your operations and pinpoint frictions — helping to
reduce costs while enhancing customer experience.

By utilizing process mining, a company can take “X-

Rays” of their operational processes regularly to
implement continuous process improvement
initiatives. The continuous improvement cycle that
process mining enables is essential for sustained
 process efficiency. Check out more process mining use
cases here.

How does process mining relate to BPM?

Business process mining enables business stakeholders to analyze data in order to enhance operational
performance, to streamline their processes, and to discover process deviations that occur in a process and how
they affect the running of a business.

Applying process mining to business process management (BPM) is becoming an essential part of how
companies do business, as it allows them to study process models and log data, and use that information to
set up a process mining manifesto, which outlines future automation initiatives, root cause analysis and
identifies improvements which can be made to any existing process. Under the hood, process mining uses
complex algorithms which is why it is essential for companies to approach their process mining efforts with an
appropriate user-friendly tool.

Types of process mining

Process mining tools provide four core capabilities: automated process discovery, conformance checking,
performance mining, and variant analysis. These core process mining capabilities are complemented with other
capabilities for data extraction and preparation, as well as functionality to construct digital process twins for
what-if analysis.

The usual steps in a process mining project are as follows:

1. Extract data from one or more enterprise systems, check the data quality, and prepare an event log. In
this step, we may need to apply privacy-enhancing technologies to protect personal data.
2. Understand the process and analyze its deviations with respect to compliance rules or a reference model
(Discovery & Conformance)
3. Identify and analyze inefficiencies and friction points (performance mining and variant analysis)
4. Discover automation and improvement opportunities, design multiple what-if scenarios, and test their
effectiveness using a digital twin of the process discovered from the event data.

Automated Process Discovery  

Automated process discovery takes an event log and  

produces an “as-is” model, which indicates exactly
how the actual process is functioning and allows for
comparison with how the company wants the process
to do. Process mining allows companies to visualize
the process, and understand where there are
problems and how can the process be enhanced via
automation or other improvement efforts.

Automated process discovery shows the actual

process flow, the points where decisions are made,
where interventions are made, by whom, where there
is a rework and redundant work, and where handoffs
happen between employees. The automated
discovery step of process mining is crucial to achieve
process transparency, which is a pre-requisite for
building a process improvement plan.

Conformance Checking
Conformance checking is the component of process
mining work where an investigation is conducted to
detect whether the business processes being
recorded in the system conforms with the applicable
business rules, regulations, and norms. For example,
conformance checking allows us to detect deviations
between the actual process and a reference process
model. It also allows us to detect violations of
 compliance rules. For example, in a purchase-to-pay
process, conformance checking allows us to isolate
instances where an invoice is approved and paid by
the same employee, in violation of the “four-eyes”
principle.

Performance Mining  

Performance mining is about analyzing the  

performance of the process from several perspectives
in order to uncover what process steps, process flows,
and other elements of a process needs most
attention or deserve an investment into automation.
This is achieved with model enhancement. Model
enhancement means that a process model is
extended or annotated with performance measures.
Model enhancement puts into evidence problematic
process flows, bottlenecks, costly and time-
consuming process steps, rework loops, prematurely
aborted cases, and other friction points.

Process performance mining is the subset of process

mining that focuses on questions like:

Where are the bottlenecks in the existing

process?
Which activities consume the highest amount of
effort?
How is the performance affected when the
workload is higher than usual?

 
Variant Analysis
  Oftentimes, it is not enough to analyze the
performance of all cases of a process at once. A lot
more can be learned by comparing multiple variants
of a process, like for example the variant of a process
executed in North America versus Europe. In this way,
we can find best practices that explain why a variant
of the process performs better than another for a
given key performance indicator.

Variant analysis is a process mining approach to

compare two or more variants of a process in order to
identify positive or negative deviance and to
generate ideas for process improvements. A common
technique for variant analysis is side-by-side or
overlaid process graph visualization. Another
technique is comparative multi-log animation, where
multiple variants of a process are replayed against a
process model simultaneously to put into evidence
their differences.

Unlock the full potential of process mining with Apromore

At Apromore, we understand that what makes process mining important is that it allows businesses to
completely understand the internal mechanisms of their business processes, how efficiently they are operating,
and in what ways they could be improved from start to end.

The Apromore software automatically sifts through the mountains of raw event data to reduce all of that
complexity into visual, color-coded, digestible information which meaningfully and accurately depicts the
performance measures of the operational business processes via process models and customizable
dashboards.
 Apromore has a decade of process mining research behind it. It is built upon innovative algorithms designed by
world-leading researchers in the field of process mining. The software is strongly focused on AI-driven
improvement, while providing a smooth user experience, access to a variety of data sources and, importantly, a
flexible and competitive pricing model for all process analytics needs.

Apromore also incorporates machine learning methods to build models to make predictions quickly and in real-
time. By leveraging process mining and machine learning together, companies can achieve process
optimization both at the tactical level and at the operational level, so that deviations, undesirable business
outcomes and SLA violations can be preempted and avoided. This combination enhances the space of process
mining use cases across the organization.

Explore Apromore’s state-of-the-art features in more Learn more about process mining and its vast
detail. benefits by checking out our whitepapers.

Key Features Explore our Whitepapers

   

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