All companies operate through theapplication of specific processes, either specific to their core business or more generic, such as IT or accounting. These processes can be entirely manual or fully automated. But more often than not, they require both human intervention and machine execution power. These are semi-automatic processes.
The digitization of processes means that they always leave a “trace” in the company’s IT system, recorded in the software’s event log. These entries provide an accurate picture of everything that goes on in your organization. This is where Process Mining comes in.
Defining process mining
This involves a factual analysis of all the digital footprints that appear during the digitized operational process, with the aim of modeling their progress and identifying trends.
Process Mining is a complete, objective audit of your company’s operations, enabling you to evaluate process performance, detect procedural violations and identify bottlenecks.
The benefits of Process Mining
Process Mining helps answer the question that all entrepreneurs ask themselves: “How exactly does my organization work?”
Analysis based on real data
Process Mining uses all the data flows from your IT system to reconstruct your processes. It then describes how your company really operates.
đ± The first use of a process mining tool in a company can sometimes be chilling. In this way, we discover that there are a multitude of processes that differ from the theoretical one.
Example:
Normally, purchase orders must be validated by the workshop manager to ensure that there have been no preparation errors. In reality, it’s the warehousemen themselves who issue it, to save time. The process mining tool will highlight the fact that the order has been prepared and validated by the warehouseman…
We then evaluate the exact performance of the processes, and the estimated performance. The search also reveals problems in the development of the theoretical process.
If we take our previous example: in theory, purchase orders should be validated immediately by the workshop manager. In practice, the latter is often busy, and warehouse workers cannot wait for it to be validated before continuing their work. The process should therefore be redesigned to make it more functional.
Automatic analysis that doesn’t consume company resources
The metadata analyzed already exists in your IT system: Process Mining requires neither data creation nor additional information input to operate. It’s a tool that’s totally invisible to your teams, and doesn’t involve any additional workload.
What’s more, Process Mining is based on fully automated algorithms, and is capable of cross-referencing data from several departments without the need for interviews and workshops, as with a traditional audit. What’s more, this automation provides a totally objective view of the process, avoiding erroneous results due to human error.
A simplified presentation of analyses
Process mining tools enable you to obtain visually clear and comprehensible results, whether in the form of graphs or process maps.
This makes it easier to study the information obtained and quickly identify bottlenecks, inadequacies and slowdowns. This speeds up the optimization of company processes.
đ If you have recurring tasks that you’d like to automate, call on the AltermĂšs teams to help you understand your business processes and automate these tasks.
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đŻ We offer you a demonstration of the CELONIS tool with the Purchase to Pay process.
