In the current global and business environment, business apps and information systems are increasingly data-heavy. Simultaneously, companies’ continuous growth generates a geometrical influx of data coming from various sources.
These data-driven technological trends have made extracting value from the data an ambitious, arduous, and complicated issue for organizations of all sizes.
Enter process mining. In case you’re genuinely interested in understanding what is process mining and how this popular process-defining development tool can help your small business thrive and reach various business goals, you’re at the right place.
Photo from La Redoute
In short, process mining is a development tool designed to identify, monitor, and upgrade core business processes by “mining” knowledge from specific data types and entry logs, which can map the business’s operations by using unique algorithms.
This process-defining instrument identifies process inefficiencies by following the digital footsteps of data through a targeted system and is significantly faster and more precise than process mapping and other alternatives.
And during times of global health and economic challenges, when assets are restricted and time adds pressure, every small business needs to keep working processes under control and operate quickly and effectively.
Rest assured that every decision taken today will somehow result in your company’s performance next year. This family of techniques in the sphere of process management that support the analysis of business processes is a compelling technology that provides you with that control for business resilience.
Now that you know what this analytical discipline is, it’s the perfect time to lay out some of the main reasons why your small-sized enterprise would need it. Here are the top five reasons why your company should embrace process mining as of today.
Process Mining Can Help You Better Understand What’s Going On Inside Your Company
The majority of business owners and managers think that they have a thorough and insightful knowledge of things regarding the processes in their company. In most cases, they have these everyday processes outlined and written down in guidebooks so that everyone involved knows what to do in a particular situation.
Still, if you ask individuals involved in these processes about their job tasks, you will often come across many deviations. The truth is that as a business owner or a manager, you are still barely scratching the surface with business processes, and the real-time situations are usually more intricate and complex.
That’s why your small business needs this technique. This instrument will help you get 100% information coverage and leave no activity or business process to escape your eye. With the help of process mining, you will understand what’s truly going on inside your company and which business processes could be further optimized.
Photo from Medium
Making The Most Of The Available Data
Even though they use many IT systems (Salesforce, SAP, etc.) and legacy apps in their everyday business operations and vast amounts of data are available in their systems, many company owners still don’t realize that they are sitting on a data gold mine.
Many of these companies often use various business intelligence tools to try and make use of their data. However, collecting and utilizing this data for optimizing operational processes can be difficult if the information is spread out over different systems, and business intelligence tools don’t offer a centralized overview.
On the other hand, process mining can help business owners and managers to bridge this gap by incorporating data from multiple sources and present it in a single intuitive solution.
Harmonizing Your Interdependent Processes
Process mining is known to pull out all process data and emphasize inter-process conflicts. Businesses can harmonize these processes to increase the effectiveness and offer superior customer service.
And process conflicts need to be resolved. For instance, imagine that you and your friend both want to cook Caesar salad and a BLT sandwich, respectively. You will certainly take different steps, but you would both need the romaine lettuce at some point. And when you need the lettuce for your dish, your friend might be using it at the very same time, making it impossible to finish your meal without waiting for a minute or two.
The same can be translated into almost every working environment out there. When processes are harmonized, such clashes are minimized, and business processes will be completed faster and more efficiently.
Different processes need a different quantity of resources at different times. With this modern-day software, you will be able to optimize resource allocation within your business and improve your work’s operative power.
Photo from Towards Data Science
Data-Driven Decision Making
Necessary conditions for data-driven decision-making include data availability, high quality of data, and robust data analytics competencies. Process mining as a process-defining instrument increases data availability and enables data-driven decision-making, which is always the best one.
Process data is often limited and unusable for most processes within organizations of all sizes without using this analytical mining approach. Process mining tools use raw data and event logs to extract the actual process sequences and close this data gap.
According to this comprehensive survey by Jan Claes and Geert Poels from the Faculty of economics and business administration in Ghent, Belgium, 60.6% of respondents say that factual process data that can be utilized for further diagnosis is a crucial benefit of this methodology by which organizations collect data from existing systems and optimize their everyday operational processes.
Photo from Datapine
Once data is collected and available, powerful data visualization tools are needed to allow the staff to effortlessly visualize and analyze the data, enabling rapid data-driven decision making and improvements in the business processes.
Process Mining Will Increase Your Business Efficiency And Reduce Risks
While each company is unique and has its own set of business goals and ambitions, many small businesses often boil down to two overarching themes: efficiency and risk. By using this technology you will be able to identify bottlenecks and develop full transparency on your numerous business processes.
Consequently, analyzing workflows with this development tool is the perfect solution to address business efficiency and risk-related problems.
Final Thoughts On Process Mining
Before the emergence of this intelligent process organizing software, businesses would have to spend considerable resources to develop a dashboard in order to track process compliance within the organization. Nowadays, process mining allows such dashboards to be created with ease, identifying compliance issues in real-time and is key to building organizational resilience.