Process and process mining

As a business user and innovation enthusiast, designing an efficient business model and process is one of the key areas I have paid attention. The easy and user-friendly process helps customers and employees to get the tasks done with a good impression of the company.

That's why in any organisation, investing efforts to establish strategically aligned and aimed process flow whether it's high-level or low and very detailed level. I may have another posting to discuss and share the depth of the process - in fact, the levels of processes are getting old-school methods due to Process Mining and other technological advancements.

Let's get started. What is process mining?

In a word, it's a linkage between data science and process science. What do I mean by this? If you are familiar with process design activity - there are lots of tools available, fancy and expensive tools or affordable Visio or PowerPoint - however, it ends up with the activity of drawing something! Even irony is you are unsure whether your systems will follow your designed processes. Process Mining reduces the efforts of drawing the flow while making sure your daily operation process flow sticks to your process. Besides, giving you how many is compliant with your process designed and deviated from with the reasons.

Process mining is not a relatively new field but is more in use these days and is the linkage between process science and data science powered by big data and information technology. It takes the data that's already been collected during the day-to-day operation of a business process and uses analytical methods to analyse and visualise it. This information can then be used to improve the efficiency of that process.

Again, going back to 'the linkage between data science and process science'. Right, process mining is an engine room to pour/upload event logs downloaded from your IT systems, and then it shows your process flow automatically and where the deviation and inefficiency are happening. It wasn't that easy so far as event log data was quite limited and many manual touch points involved, where data may be missing or not logged properly. Now, taking data from IT systems and mapping it against the process model is a lot smoother and straights forward than before so process mining gains more attention.

By applying process mining, there are several benefits can be achieved. Process mining could be a panacea for all process-related questions, but to be categorised into three main things;

• Discovery - radically transparently visualise your process

• Conformance - your current process is how similar to your aimed process model. On your blueprint process vs actual operation process

• Enhancement - Discover and need for improvement. It can be done via a separate Business Process Reengineering or embedded machine learning engine in your process mining tools

Last but not least, I want to share open-source or paid tools for process mining so you can take a look.

• ProM: https://www.promtools.org/doku.php

• Disco: https://fluxicon.com/disco/

• Celonis: https://www.celonis.com/process-mining/how-does-process-mining-work/

• UI Path: https://www.uipath.com/product/process-mining

I am personally looking forward to seeing how much impact Processes Mining can bring by improving business process efficiency and how the Process Mining technology can be evolved further together with data science and emerging AI tools.