Get started with Process Mining

Discover the reality of your processes

Are you thinking about starting a process mining project? Read on to find out how process mining, previously referred to as automated business process discovery, fits into your company and current process analysis approach!

Why Process Mining?

Traditionally, a company’s business processes are analyzed and modeled based on interviews and workshops with both customers and employees. While these methods may provide interesting insights, they take a long time, cost a lot of money, and rarely provide the full picture of what is happening right now - making it hard to know what to improve.

Process mining takes an entirely different - and far more objective - approach, analyzing your business continuously by studying the data behind your operations.

Traditional Methods	Process Mining
Subjective	Objective
Time-consuming	Instant
Resource-heavy	High ROI
Looking at one specific point in time	Continuous and predictive
Hard to visualize	Automatically visualized

Use your operational data to drive better business results

Process mining uses your operational data to drive better business results. In process mining, a process mining software is used to continuously analyze and visualize the flow of your operations to pinpoint specific ways in which you can improve your business. Below, you can read about our approach with our process mining software QPR ProcessAnalyzer:

Process-Mining-5-Steps

Process Mining Value Realization Model

Process mining is easier and more cost-effective than many people realize – with near instant results:

Make better and faster decisions
Measure and report performance
Increase the automation rate

Value creation with process mining

Process mining introduces fact-based transparency into your business operations, which together with the root causes and improvement suggestions for any inefficiencies allows you to cut costs and improve efficiency, customer satisfaction, and profit.

Where Can Process Mining be Applied?

Process mining can be applied to, essentially, any process. Typical use cases include Robotic Process Automation (RPA), process KPI reporting, digital transformation, auditing and compliance, process improvement, and IT and ERP development.

Digital transformation

Business leaders need to understand how their organization works, what to prioritize, and what to transform. Process mining helps you understand your processes and see how they contribute to business outcomes.

Auditing & Compliance

QPR's process mining software pinpoints compliance issues and visualizes processes automatically, so auditors and risk- or compliance managers gain full insight into the actual process performance. Process mining shows you all your process variations and deviations, and lets you monitor e.g. company-wide compliance, Service Level Agreements, as well as Four Eye Principle trends and violations. With process benchmarking, you can also compare your as-is process with the as-designed process and identify your best practices.

Process Improvement

Gain access to your end-to-end processes, so you can locate bottlenecks and prioritize your process improvement efforts to achieve a better ROI. This way, you will be able to drive digital transformation initiatives, such as Robotic Process Automation, without constantly running into problems.

How does Process Mining work?

The data required for process mining comes in the form of event logs that IT systems typically record at various points along your business process flow timeline. By quickly extracting and reading these event logs, process mining software builds an instant visual model of a given flow. These models allow you not only to identify any deviations from an optimal business process but also to understand the reason for the variation so that you can make the necessary adjustments.

Getting started with process mining is simpler than you would imagine. Required event data contains these three columns:

The case ID. This is a series of characters that identify different cases in the system, for example, sales order number, purchase order number or an order line identification number.
Event type. This explains the process step which is occurring, for example that the purchase order has been created.
A timestamp. This is the actual time when each process steps completed.

With this data, the process mining tool will automatically create business process flowchart diagrams, lead time analysis, and other out-of-the-box reports. Process mining can then be further expanded to develop root cause analysis by adding case level attributes like region, product group, customer group, payment term, pricing condition & user.

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Start Your Organization's Process Mining Journey with QPR ProcessAnalyzer

With 25 years of experience, 2 000 customers and over a million licenses sold, QPR Software’s products are highly regarded by customers and industry analysts alike.

QPR ProcessAnalyzer visualizes and analyzes process flows that take place in organizations. This enterprise-grade process mining software offers seamless data collection and integration through standard connectors that are available for all major operational systems, such as SAP, Oracle, and ServiceNow. QPR ProcessAnalyzer is recognized by top industry analysts like Gartner Research, Forrester and Everest Group.

Advanced AI combined with easy-to-use, ready-made charts and analyses

QPR ProcessAnalyzer combines advanced AI, Machine Learning, and predictions with the industry’s most comprehensive set of ready-made charts and analyses. These process mining features are available for a variety of use cases – ranging from RPA and Digital Transformation to KPI Reporting.

With the leading Root Cause analysis, customers such as KBC Group, EY, and Nokia have been able to easily spot causes for their operational inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and compliance issues.

Users of QPR ProcessAnalyzer around the world have been able to increase their efficiency and cut costs: Piraeus Bank managed to cut its loan application process from 35 minutes to 5 minutes, while Metsä Board was able to reduce its amount of rework by 80%.

In the words of Stewart Wallace, Risk Analytics Director at EY UK: "QPR ProcessAnalyzer is the one that I always turn to for ease of use and fastest time to insight."

The 5 Steps of Process Mining with QPR:

1. Connect data
QPR ProcessAnalyzer uses the event data that is already available in your IT systems (ERP, CRM, BPM…)

2. Discover processes
You will see automatic visualizations of your as-is process flows and discover how your processes work in reality.

3. Analyze root causes
The Root Cause Analysis reveals causes to inefficiencies and bottlenecks. Use the insights to increase efficiency.

4. Automate processes
Identify processes that are suitable for automation. Optimize processes and monitor automation rates and trends.

5. Monitor KPIs
Keep monitoring your KPIs and measure how your strategic objectives are met.