You’re on a treasure hunt to discover the best ways to do work, boost efficiency, improve employee and customer satisfaction and increase your revenue. But the first step in any treasure hunt is finding your treasure map.

In the case of your business processes, process mining software gives you that map with real-time insights that act as your compass to how you can improve your process flow. And once you know your destination, intelligent automation (IA) puts the wind in your sails to get you there faster by automating tasks.

What Is Process Mining?

Process mining is extracting and analyzing data from your information systems to help you understand, monitor and improve your business processes. Using event log data, it creates process models that show how processes are executed and determine process performance.

How can I use process mining?

The goal of process mining is to give organizations fact-based insights into as-is processes and uncover inefficiencies and opportunities to get their ideal processes, often through automation.

Process mining is your map to discovering hidden information, visualizing entire processes and showing you a path toward process optimization; it’s an ongoing journey of continuous improvement.

How does it relate to task mining?

Process mining and task mining together are the perfect combination for starting a successful automation program. Process mining uses event log data to create process maps showing how specific processes are executed. Meanwhile, task mining works on the smaller components of a process or subprocess, looking at the granular clicks to show how a task is completed. You can think of task mining as the individual steps within your treasure map to get to the final destination.

What is intelligent automation?

Knowing where you can make improvements to your processes is just one step of process mining. Once you know that, you can mark the spots where there are the best automation candidates – the ‘X’ on your treasure map – and deploy digital workers. IA’s digital workers handle these boring, repetitive tasks so they’re done faster and more accurately by combining robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI) and business process management (BPM). It automates end-to-end processes, making work better for your people and your business.

What Are The 10 Benefits of Process Mining Software?

The benefits of process mining tools interrelate; better productivity equals better cost savings, and fewer errors save time and money. We’ve specifically identified ten key benefits:

1 - Data-driven decisions

Process mining uses your raw data and event logs to extract process sequences and close data gaps. These insights unlock an accurate overview into everything occurring within your end-to-end processes, which facilitates more informed decision-making that will help you further improve the way work gets done.

2 - Increase transparency

By visualizing the actual process flow, businesses can gain a clear understanding of how their business operations work. This visibility extends to every stage of the process, revealing hidden inefficiencies and bottlenecks. Increased transparency also promotes accountability. When everyone can see how their actions impact the overall process, they’re more likely to take responsibility for their tasks. This can lead to improved performance and productivity and empower employees to seek new ways to optimize their work.

3 - Improve process efficiency

Process mining identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies to help you streamline your processes and eliminate waste – resulting in cost savings and improved profitability. Plus, it helps optimize your resources, leading to increased productivity.

4 - Enhance compliance

Process mining can help ensure that business processes comply with internal and external regulations. By visualizing the process flow, you can identify deviations from the standard process and take corrective actions. Process mining also provides evidence of compliance. The event logs used in process mining can serve as a record of the process, demonstrating that you’ve followed the required procedures.

5 - Improve customer experience

Your customer experience is contingent on streamlined processes, which process mining helps you realize. The simpler and better the services they receive, the happier they will be – increasing their brand loyalty and boosting your revenue. Process mining tools also facilitate real-time process management, helping you determine issues and react to them faster, so customers are always getting the best.

6 - Allocate resources better

By identifying inefficient tasks in your business processes and improving their performance for automation, you can better allocate resources, which then helps you improve cost savings. By continuously improving these processes you can boost productivity. And by eliminating manual work you can reduce human errors.

7 - Standardize processes

With increasingly complex processes, process mining can help you dig into the specifics of how your processes run so you can make them more consistent. Process mining flags inconsistencies and creates logs to help you see the differences between actual and ideal processes, allowing you to ensure quality – which is too time-consuming and error-prone if done manually.

8 - Understand your as-is processes

Knowledge is power, and understanding your processes is a necessary step to improving them. Before you invest in a new technology, it’s best practice to determine how your business currently runs and where you can reap the most benefits. Process mining helps identify the best places to automate first and also gives you a solid grasp of what can be done better.

9 - Improve employee experience

While your employees can probably tell you a few areas where there are bottlenecks and inefficiencies, process mining delivers unbiased, data-driven insights to determine exactly where these siloes are, unearthing ones your people might not have even considered. With these insights, you can then make your employees’ work better by reducing the tedious and time-consuming tasks and making operations flow smoother.

10 - Continuous improvement

Process mining is the treasure map that keeps on giving. Once you’ve unearthed one treasure, it seeks out the next and the next. There are no restrictions on how many times you can use it, so you can continuously monitor your as-is processes and check how your optimization efforts are improving your business, and where you can focus more attention in the future. Continuous improvement is the key to automation and driving further business growth.

Why Should You Invest In Process Mining Technology?

With the right approach and the right tools, process mining helps you transform your operations and drive growth. But to do that, you need to determine what your business goals are and the cost of implementing automation into your organization. Look at your systems and determine whether you have the infrastructure. Find use cases for your industry with automation solutions that fit your budget and systems capacity. And finally, find tools that suit your needs.

Intelligently automate your industry by looking at process mining use cases from other organizations like yours:

• Process mining in manufacturing and the supply chain.
• Process mining in banking and financial services.
• Process mining in healthcare.

What technology can I use?

We’ll introduce you to a couple of process mining tools that bring in other technologies, such as task mining and BPM, to empower you to do more with your automated processes.

Process intelligence

Process intelligence combines process mining, task mining and business intelligence. It enacts systematic process data collection to analyze the individual steps, helping identify bottlenecks and improve efficiency through discovery, analysis and process optimization. Most process intelligence software uses artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision to create a detailed process map or process definition document (PDD) of the digital processes across your applications and departments.

What we offer: SS&C | Blue Prism® Process Intelligence powered by ABBYY Timeline integrates best-of-breed process mining and task mining with IA and BPM to facilitate data-driven decisions and deliver a unified workforce with the ability to continuously monitor, respond and predict future outcomes.

Task capturing

A PDD is necessary for representing the as-is business processes you’ve chosen to automate. It’s a document outlining all the steps within an end-to-end process; when done manually, this can take a long time and you can easily miss steps. Automating PDD creation can save a lot of time and resources for your organization.

What we offer: SS&C | Blue Prism® Capture enables process owners to accurately capture and optimize their process and provide developers with a detailed, auto-generated automation prototype. It functions on a single platform, combining task extraction and computer vision to automatically produce a PDD.

According to a 2022 survey of Capture customers, 86% of SS&C Blue Prism customers have confirmed that utilizing Capture within their RPA solution helps them to automate faster.

Sail To Clearer Waters

Process mining will guide you to smooth sailing with your automation initiatives. It identifies the best headwinds, shows you the shallow waters and helps you avoid the storms holding your business back.

Try process intelligence or Capture today and start seeing results from your intelligent automation sooner.