Process mining is an emerging discipline providing comprehensive sets of tools to provide fact-based insights to support process improvements. This new discipline builds on process model-driven approaches and data mining.
Traditional Business Process Management (BPM) is a top-down approach that starts with a process model that is then implemented in IT systems. On the other hand, process mining is a BPM approach that is bottom-up. It uses historical event data along with timestamps in IT systems (e.g. SAP ERP) to reconstruct the process. As it is based on actual events, it is a true representation of real process in comparison to the traditional BPM approach that is based on theoretical or ideal process flows and hence relies on belief or hearsay.
How Process Mining is helping enterprises:
Process discovery: The threading together of process steps using event data allows for the visualization of the real process flow in terms of core process steps as well as the alternate process steps for a particular process.
Process deviations and compliance: The visualization of alternate process flows helps in seeing where the ideal process flow is interrupted and where deviations take place. This helps in compliance by determining whether certain mandatory process steps are being excluded or whether certain unwanted steps are being executed.
Process performance: The statistics that are generated from process mining help in determining the performance of various processes as well as the performance between process steps. This helps in identifying the bottlenecks in the process flow.
As process mining helps in coupling event data with process models, it is possible to check conformance, detect deviations, predict delays, compare processes, support decision making and recommend process redesign.
Implementation aspect of process mining:
It can be immediately & non-intrusively put into practice due to the practical applicability of the techniques, sophisticated process mining software and the abundance of event data in today’s information systems.
