Process mining: The stepping-stone on your digital transformation journey | HCLTech

Process mining: The stepping-stone on your digital transformation journey

 
January 12, 2023
Sadanand S Mudgur

Author

Sadanand S Mudgur
Global Director, Digital Process Operations
Kajal Khengar Gangani

Co-author

Kajal Khengar Gangani
Deputy Manager
January 12, 2023
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An enhanced focus on digital technologies is empowering enterprises to streamline operations and stay ahead in a competitive business paradigm.

As more and more organizations accelerate digital transformation initiatives, the need of the hour has become methods to find the efficient ways of identifying, analyzing, and monitoring their business processes as it is said ‘we cannot improve what we cannot see’. This is where process mining steps in.

Traditional methods of process mapping are manual intensive and time consuming, and even after that, there may not exist a single view of all the possible paths, bottlenecks, exceptions, and variations of the visible process. Humans could take anywhere from weeks to months to come up with a visualization that may actually help them understand how the process truly works and identify the gaps to make key business process improvements.

With process mining, organizations can identify what is really happening in their processes on ground instead of assumptions. Root causes of bottlenecks in the process can be identified in real-time to optimize and achieve an optimized process.

The process mining meaning is simple. Process mining is a discipline related to process management and data science which supports operational process analysis based on event logs. It empowers businesses to sustain this large-scale digital transformation and process optimization by equipping them with a thorough understanding of the business process with all its paths, variants, and exceptions. Through its data-driven approach, businesses not only gain an understanding of the fundamentals of their process, but the inefficiencies that hinder performance as well. Enterprises, media, and analysts unanimously recognize process mining as a way to create a replica/digital twin of business processes- a living picture of the way business functions.

Optimal implementation of process mining can reduce the cost of manufacture and logistics by up to , and can also boost inventory capital release by up to along with substantial process optimization. Its effectiveness is further cemented by the fact that 83% of enterprises plan to utilize process mining for effective process optimization.

It offers data driven and fact-based insights to improve your existing business processes.

Process mining enabling digital transformation

Process mining acts as a bridge between data and science. It incorporates algorithms, data mining, machine learning, process science, and predictive analytics to improve business process management, enable automation, and enhance workflows. By creating an X-Ray of business processes from pre-existing data, process mining benefits enterprises by identifying and rectifying the gaps in their processes. It also enables them to holistically discover, inspect, optimize, and survey their business processes.

Process mining functions by gathering source data from the systems and then mapping it into a process with the help of advanced AI. By leveraging cutting-edge innovation, it reads event logs and identifies work processes to reveal all the potential variations, paths, and exceptions that might occur. This provides businesses with a comparative view between process design and execution, enabling them to identify the inadequacies in their processes and the most efficient ways for improvement. Using these insights, enterprises can devise effective solutions for process optimization and digital transformation.

Process mining visualizes business processes along with their variations by extracting information from event logs. For the success of this discipline, it is necessary for every event log to possess at least three attributes:

  • Identifiers
  • Activities
  • Time stamps

A unique identifier allows the end-to-end tracing of an individual case. Process activities indicate the individual tasks of a case, capturing every variation within the process. Meanwhile, time stamps help to keep a record of the duration of the transactions and tasks, so that the sequence in the occurrence of the activities and the time required for each step can be tracked.

These features enable the process mining platform to map a process flow and create its digital footprint. This, in turn, optimizes the business process by eliminating human bias, and identifying gaps and inefficiencies.

Key benefits of process mining

Through leveraging process mining, enterprises can unlock numerous benefits to ease their transition into the digital ecosystem. Process mining benefits include:

  • Insights based on facts: Process mining leverages actual data to deliver objective insights that allow seamless audit, improvement, and analysis of business processes.
  • Fast, cheap, and accurate: It is an inexpensive, faster, and more accurate way of process mapping in comparison to the traditional manual and intensive methods.
  • No replacement required: As process mining works in synergy with existing systems, there is no requirement for replacing equipment.

The HCLTech advantage

For enterprises, an efficient process mining tool is critical for the identification of effective methods for process improvement with valuable data-driven insights. HCLTech has partnered with leading data processing company like Celonis, Signavio, FortressIQ, ABBYY and UiPath to offer advanced process mining services to its customers. With this, HCLTech empowers its clients to transform their businesses through human-centric digital design embedded within the SAP ecosystem.

To kickstart your business process improvement journey with us, please contact Sadanand S Mudgur for a 1-hour value discovery workshop and solution demo.

References

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