Process Mining – just another buzzword for the business world or an actual added value for companies?
When business processes become more complex, the potential for errors and vulnerabilities also increases. This often leads to the fact that manual reworking is required again and again. To avoid such interruptions in day-to-day business, process mining can be used as a suitable method to analyze the digital traces of business processes.
Process mining belongs to the data mining techniques and evaluates data in order to draw valuable insights from it. The approach visualizes business processes based on event data with the aim of monitoring and optimizing them. The advantage? Process mining makes it possible to uncover hidden patterns and deviations in processes. This helps to identify bottlenecks, increase efficiency and reduce costs.
Simply put, process mining is a powerful method for business process management and its optimization. Companies seeking a data-driven, transparent view of their process landscape can benefit from process mining and the valuable insights it provides for strategic decision-making. Process mining can be used to uncover patterns and deviations in processes. This helps to identify bottlenecks, increase efficiency and reduce costs.
How does digital data become added value?
The process is based on a strong data foundation. Event data is usually captured in existing IT systems, for example, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, workflow management systems, or other database-driven applications.
In addition to the different systems, there are also tools that use different algorithms to identify patterns and relationships in the data. In most cases, the event data is stored as event logs or event logs. These then contain information about activities performed, resources, timestamps and other relevant data. Depending on the company, this may be data on orders, contracts, communications or other company activities.
This data can either converge automatically via existing interfaces or be merged using specialized tools to create the basis for process mining. In some cases, information must also be added manually to clarify the context of the data and reveal certain relationships.
Process optimization through process mining
How exactly does digital data help companies optimize processes?
- Transparency and visibility: With process mining, processes in the company can be displayed transparently, thereby revealing bottlenecks, deviations and inefficiencies.
- Process optimization and efficiency increase: Based on the transparent process flows, inefficient and superfluous steps can be avoided and error-prone processes can be optimized. This increases the efficiency of company processes.
- Error detection and quality improvement: Errors and deviations can be detected more quickly and easily, so that measures can be initiated at an early stage. This improves process quality in the long term and reduces error rates.
- Compliance and risk management: Automatic analysis of process data can identify potential risks and violations so that companies can take appropriate measures to minimize security risks and ensure that their processes comply with legal requirements.
- Continuous improvement: Process mining also includes real-time monitoring and adjustments of running processes.
So, the process mining approach helps the company in various areas and can provide insights into the business processes by analyzing the digital data. As a result, processes in the company can be optimized, costs reduced and performance improved.
Prerequisites for process mining
Since the protection and security of digital data can be complex and costly, a suitable security concept should be aimed for at the very beginning of the data journey. A security concept supports companies in identifying and assessing risks in connection with process mining. It enables systematic analysis of potential threats and vulnerabilities related to process data and provides mitigation measures.
After that, the analysis and interpretation of the collected digital data can begin. This requires a clean data base that is qualified for evaluation. Before successful process mining, data and information silos must be cleansed and interconnected to ensure information exchange and collaboration between interfaces, or data quality will suffer.
In addition to cleaning up existing data, extracting the most relevant information from the amount of digital data available can be an additional challenge. This requires specialized knowledge and skills to select the digital data that will lead to the most accurate analyses and predictions. Finally, you need an open corporate culture that is willing to make changes and optimize processes based on the findings.
With the right experts to better business processes
At COCUS we develop innovative IT solutions & services with the latest technologies in the areas of connectivity, infrastructure, software development, data analytics and security. Therefore we can support your company in preparing and executing the optimization and monitoring of your business processes in the best possible way. By analyzing digital event data, inefficient processes can be identified and improved. With data-driven insights, you continuously improve your business processes and thus move your company forward.
