What Is Process Mining?
On your journey to improve business processes, you need to understand where you are today. This can be achieved manually using workshops and observations to model your processes – or you can use process mining to create an accurate and objective picture.
Taking the manual approach can lead to personal views of how people ‘think’ processes run, while the process mining approach will lead to a fuller and more accurate representation of the end-to-end process. This more disciplined approach also allows you to include the naturally occurring variances and nuances within complex processes.
As Professor Pedro Robledo says, process mining allows “a party to extract information from event and transaction logs to discover models that describe processes … so it reduces the time necessary to model a process that is then optimized and automated in BPM”.
In short, process mining uses the operational data (date, time, user, activity, object, etc.) stored in your system event logs to uncover what actually happens. This detailed insight provides an accurate view of process flows and performance that support improvements and new process development.
