Stop mining and start discovering with Business Process Discovery
So what will happen with Process Mining?
In Dr. Decker’s words, “Process mining will soon be subsumed as an inherent capability within any good professional business process analysis tool.” This means process mining will aid the faster creation of baseline models from which to perform analysis and process improvement, but will no longer exist as an “analytics-only” toolset.
In the past, mapping business processes has typically been a manual effort—time-consuming, often inaccurate, and expensive. Although Process Mining allowed for better accuracy and a wider scope than manual efforts, organizations also want to take action and effect change, to justify continued high investment over a long period.
This is where automated business process discovery (ABPD) comes in. Process discovery, also called business process discovery, is a collection of tools and techniques used to define, map and analyze an organization’s existing business processes.
How do we bridge the gap between analysis and action?
I am not predicting that people won’t want or need to invest in process mining. What I am suggesting is that the technology will be seeking a new home, new price point, and a different value proposition. From a Signavio perspective, I already see that clients need to mix the system processes that they can view through process mining with the manual steps that inevitably take place in a true end-to-end process. In fact, many performance issues can immediately be traced to a misalignment between manual and automated processes. (Dr. Gero Decker)
Automation software overcomes these obstacles by “watching” business users perform normal activities within their organizational framework, from ERP systems to web apps and many more. Using artificial intelligence, ABPD then chains together business processes across different end-users to traverse organizational silos, giving you an accurate view of the full end-to-end business process and all its variations. ABPD delivers information on bottlenecks, variances, root causes and the distribution of the process instances, thus enabling meaningful simulation. It’s all about capturing what has happened in a real-life process.
A good process discovery tool will allow you not only to capture what has happened in a real-life process, but will give you the information you need to implement the changes that will be most impactful to your organization. Good process discovery empowers you to:
- Unearth the truth about your processes and make better decisions based on true evidence found in your organization’s IT systems
- Conduct powerful fact-based analysis, leading to smarter business decisions and reducing the time taken to implement change that matters
- Leverage conformance checking in order to ensure that standard practices are executed as intended, quickly identifying exceptions
- Build a complete end-to-end perspective and understanding of exactly what is happening in your organization in a matter of weeks
Real-time process monitoring
When attempting to capture what has happened in a real-life process, many organizations fall short in their process initiatives when it comes to real-time process monitoring capabilities. The subsequent lack of real-time visibility and insight into business operations create a number of significant challenges: Difficulty in optimizing customer experiences; delays in manufacturing and supply chain processes, leading to waste, excess inventory, or increased costs; and an inability to leverage all available data to optimize execution or personalize a customer interaction.
Continuous monitoring of process health is crucial if you want to avoid these missteps, and ensure your organization is operationally excellent. Leveraging your process mining technology and applying it in a way that allows for continuous process monitoring in real-time will ensure that your organization can more readily obtain cross-system views. Process mining based performance monitoring will look at the overall health of the process and not just monitor from a queue or resource perspective.
As discussed by Gartner, process discovery will usurp the mining-only focus of many process analysis initiatives. Having an analytical tool that also provides actionable insights and allows organizations to monitor their processes in real-time will become a prime use case in 2019.
Ready to find out more?
As part of SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite, SAP Signavio Process Intelligence integrates perfectly with SAP Signavio Process Manager and is accessible from the SAP Signavio Collaboration Hub. As an entirely cloud-based process mining solution, the tool makes it easy to collaborate with colleagues from all over the world and harness the wisdom of the crowd to generate more ideas, optimize processes and reduce resistance to change.
If you’d like to know more, you can consider Signavio’s 7 Steps to Operational Excellence, and start making your data work for you. Or, if you’re ready to discover for yourself what the Suite can do, why not sign up for a free 30-day trial with Signavio?