Sanofi built an enterprise-wide process mining Center of Excellence using QPR Software’s QPR ProcessAnalyzer and Snowflake to improve procurement, HR, finance, supply chain, manufacturing and R&D processes. In just a few years, Sanofi reduced 4,904 procurement change events, automated HR ticket analysis with AI, and certified over 200 employees in process mining.
What separates companies that run a few successful process mining pilots from those that build enterprise-wide process intelligence capabilities? For Sanofi, the answer came down to structure, knowledge, and a willingness to let AI do the heavy lifting — so humans could focus on what actually moves the needle.
For global organizations, the difference often comes down to one thing: structure.
Sanofi — one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies — transformed process mining from isolated initiatives into an enterprise-wide Process Mining Center of Excellence (CoE). By combining AI-powered process mining, scalable governance, and a modern data foundation in Snowflake, Sanofi built a model that now supports procurement, HR, finance, supply chain, manufacturing, and R&D.
This is how they did it.
Scaled process mining from two pilot projects into an enterprise-wide Process Mining Center of Excellence
Reduced procurement change events by 4,904 in just four months
Replaced manual HR ticket analysis with AI-powered weekly reporting
Accelerated root cause analysis using LLMs and plain-language insights
Certified 200+ employees in process mining to scale internal capabilities
Expanded process intelligence across procurement, HR, finance, supply chain, manufacturing, and R&D
Enabled native process mining directly in Snowflake for greater scalability and governance
In pharmaceutical operations, complexity is unavoidable. Global enterprises like Sanofi manage procurement, HR, finance, manufacturing, supply chain, and R&D across hundreds of systems, countries, and regulatory environments.
This complexity makes enterprise process mining increasingly critical. Without process visibility, bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and compliance risks remain hidden.
Getting those processes to run efficiently isn't just a cost optimization story. When your product pipeline includes an immunology vaccine protecting over six million infants annually, operational delay has a human cost.
The challenge most large enterprises face isn't a shortage of data. It's a shortage of actionable insight — and a reliable way to connect what the data shows to decisions that measurably change outcomes.
Sanofi spent years trying to close that gap. What they found was that process mining — specifically, an enterprise-wide approach anchored in a formal Center of Excellence — could do what dashboards alone never managed: turn process visibility into verified business value.
Sanofi’s journey with QPR Software’s QPR ProcessAnalyzer began in 2021 with two pilot processes: Purchase-to-Pay and Customer Invoice-to-Cash. It’s a familiar starting point. What’s less familiar is what happened next.
Rather than treating these pilots as standalone wins, Sanofi’s Business Operations team used that momentum to formalize a Process Mining Center of Excellence in 2022.
This marked a major shift — from isolated process mining projects to an enterprise-wide capability designed to scale process intelligence across the organization.
By 2023, that work had already earned recognition through a Hackett Group award for talent management, following significant cycle time reductions in HR job change processes.
By 2024, the team had migrated its data foundation to Snowflake and expanded its process mining scope into manufacturing, R&D, and supply chain. This gave Sanofi the ability to run process mining directly where its enterprise data resides — unlocking the full benefits of speed, scalability, and governance through QPR Software’s native Snowflake architecture.
By 2025, Sanofi had certified more than 200 colleagues in process mining and embedded AI directly into its analysis workflows.
The timeline matters.
This is not a case study about a six-month project. It’s an example of what sustained, compounding investment in enterprise process intelligence actually looks like — and what it takes to make it scale.
At the core of Sanofi’s Process Mining Center of Excellence is a Value Realization Framework — a structured model designed to connect process mining insights directly to measurable business outcomes.
For many organizations, process mining delivers strong visibility into how processes actually run. But visibility alone does not create value. The real challenge is translating insights into actions that improve performance against clear business KPIs.
Sanofi faced this exact challenge.
For years, the process mining team worked closely with business process owners, producing high-quality analysis and dashboards across multiple functions. Yet one gap remained: linking those initiatives consistently to quantifiable, time-bound business value.
Collaboration cycles often stretched without clear decision points. Business users needed time to interpret findings, align internally, and decide where to act. As a result, the connection between process insights and measurable business outcomes remained too indirect.
To solve this, Sanofi redesigned its delivery model.
Today, each process mining initiative follows a strict two-to-three-month timeline with a clearly defined scope: a data model and dashboard framework built directly around business user stories, operational pain points, and KPI targets.
This changes the conversation from “What does the data tell us?” to “What business outcome are we trying to improve — and how do we measure it?”
That shift matters.
Instead of treating process mining as an analytical support function, Sanofi turned it into a structured business performance engine — one where value is framed upfront, tracked continuously, and tied directly to operational improvement.
As Edina Varga, Process and Data Analyst at Sanofi, explains:
“We always align with the goals of the global business process owners. If they have a target KPI, our process mining initiative should be aligned with that — this is how we frame value and prioritize the most significant business cases.”
This shift — from analyzing process data to operationalizing business value — is what transforms a Process Mining Center of Excellence from a reporting function into a scalable driver of enterprise performance.
Procurement is one of the highest-leverage areas for process mining in manufacturing-intensive industries. The complexity of purchase requisitions and purchase orders across multiple systems — in Sanofi's case, SAP, Athena, and SHIFT — creates ample opportunity for undesired change events: modifications that signal rework, miscommunication, or systemic inefficiency.
Using QPR ProcessAnalyzer to surface the root causes of these change events, the team identified recurring patterns and built a Value Realization Dashboard allowing stakeholders to compare performance across a defined before/after window. Monthly business reviews tracked the trend. Four months after go-live, the result was unambiguous: 4,904 fewer change events in the post-intervention period.
This is the kind of outcome that changes how procurement leadership thinks about process data — not as reporting, but as a continuous improvement signal.
In HR operations, a familiar bottleneck exists in almost every large organization: experts spending hours reading through free-text service tickets to understand what employees are actually struggling with. For Sanofi, that meant manually parsing ServiceNow tickets related to payroll, leave calculations, and time tracking to identify patterns.
The team's approach was direct: embed an LLM model into QPR ProcessAnalyzer to automate this analysis on a weekly cadence. Now, HR experts receive a structured weekly report — no manual effort required — surfacing the top drivers of ticket volume and emerging trends. When the Budapest team's May report showed that more than half of all tickets related to leave time tracking and payroll discrepancies, they had the insight they needed to act immediately.
The productivity gain here isn't just about hours saved. It's about redirecting specialized expertise away from pattern-matching and toward the problem-solving only humans can do.
Root cause analysis in QPR ProcessAnalyzer is analytically powerful — but analytical power is only useful if decision-makers can act on the outputs. Sanofi identified a real friction point: business users needed significant time to interpret root cause findings before they could respond to them.
The fix was elegant: pair QPR's root cause analysis model with an LLM that automatically translates statistical findings into plain-language summaries. In one invoice processing analysis, the system surfaced that the presence of a user change request event increased the probability of late payment to 60% — and communicated that finding directly, in a summary format that required no analytical training to interpret.
The result is a significant compression of the insight-to-action cycle: accurate, data-driven findings delivered in a form that everyone from a process analyst to a finance director can act on the same day.
Perhaps the most architecturally interesting use case is in patient onboarding, where the team built an operational dashboard enabling colleagues to flag individual cases for review directly from the interface. Each flag creates an artificial event type — a "QPR Review Action" — written back to the Snowflake data model.
The sophistication here is in what that enables downstream. With flagged cases logged as events, it becomes trivial to compare what happened to those cases before and after review, count outcomes, and calculate the value generated by each analysis cycle. This closes a loop that most process mining implementations leave open: the ability to convert operational findings into a credible, data-backed business case, at the individual case level.
Any Center of Excellence faces the same growth ceiling: the team's own capacity. The more valuable the insights, the more the organization demands them — and the harder it becomes to serve that demand without scaling the knowledge base itself.
Sanofi addressed this directly through a tailor-made certification program built in collaboration with QPR, delivered via a dedicated platform with single sign-on. After three to four hours of learning, colleagues receive an externally recognized process mining certification. More than 200 employees completed it in the first months after the 2025 launch.
The downstream effect is real: fewer basic questions escalating to the CoE team, higher-quality business-led analysis, and a broader organizational capacity to turn process data into action without specialist intervention.
"We can already see the knowledge base has increased and fewer and fewer questions are raised — and this directly contributes to our success and value delivery." — Adam Honved, Manager of Process Analytics, Sanofi
The Sanofi story isn't primarily about process mining software — it's about an organizational model for turning process data into sustained business improvement. A few patterns stand out for any life sciences or healthcare company considering a similar path.
Start with a mandate, not just a project. The formalization of a Center of Excellence in 2022 was the inflection point. Pilot success gets a team invited back. A CoE mandate gets them embedded.
Frame value before you measure it. The Value Realization Framework works because it forces a conversation about KPIs and desired outcomes before analysis begins — not after. This changes how business partners engage with the work.
AI accelerates the last mile. The integration of LLMs into root cause analysis and ticket review didn't replace process mining — it removed the bottlenecks that kept insights from reaching decision-makers at speed. In a regulated industry where expert time is constrained and expensive, this matters enormously.
Scale the knowledge, not just the team. Certifying 200+ colleagues is a force multiplier. It doesn't replace the CoE — it makes the CoE's work more impactful by raising the floor of process intelligence across the organization.
Adam Honved, Manager of Process Analytics at Sanofi, put it simply:
"For me personally, contributing to the efficiency of delivering products like our immunology vaccine — knowing it protects more than 6 million infants each year — makes this work genuinely motivating."
At the intersection of operational excellence and mission-driven work, that's what enterprise process mining looks like when it matures past the pilot stage. Not a technology deployment — a capability that compounds over time, touches every major business function, and ultimately connects operational data to the outcomes that matter most.
Sanofi uses QPR ProcessAnalyzer across procurement, HR, finance, supply chain, manufacturing, and R&D — demonstrating how QPR’s process intelligence platform can scale from targeted operational improvements to enterprise-wide transformation. As the only process mining platform running natively in Snowflake, QPR gives organizations a unique ability to analyze processes directly where their data resides, combining speed, governance, and scalability in a way traditional architectures cannot.
What is a Process Mining Center of Excellence?
A Process Mining Center of Excellence is a structured organizational capability that scales process intelligence, governance, and business value across an enterprise.
How does process mining improve pharmaceutical operations?
Process mining helps pharmaceutical companies identify bottlenecks, compliance risks, inefficiencies, and delays across procurement, HR, manufacturing, supply chain, and R&D.
How can AI improve process mining?
AI can automate root cause analysis, summarize complex findings in plain language, and uncover patterns in structured and unstructured process data.
Why is native Snowflake architecture important for process mining?
A native Snowflake architecture allows process mining to run directly where enterprise data resides — eliminating unnecessary data movement, reducing latency, and improving governance.
Unlike traditional process mining architectures that require moving data into separate environments, QPR Software’s QPR ProcessAnalyzer runs natively inside Snowflake. This gives organizations a unique advantage: faster time to insight, stronger data control, and greater scalability for enterprise-wide process intelligence.