Holistic Understanding of Process Mining | Uses, Applications and Tools
Process Mining enables businesses to understand their processes which is critical to business success.
Process Mining is a technique to analyse the process of any situation. In every organisation, Process management plays a major role. Several Companies experience bankruptcy, Loss due to bad process management. Many Business leaders focus on processes as a success key. However, results depends on external factors too. But over the long run, better processes yield better results.
Despite the importance of processes, Companies have limited data regarding how their processes are running. The accumulation of data is making sure that analyses of process cannot be on gut feeling, instead we need proper calculation and fact based figures to back it up our claims.
Why Process mining?
As various business process are very complex so to we use process mining technique in order to make the process efficient. Organisations can have a added benefit from their competition. It helps to make Data-driven decision making.
How Does it work?
Every companies have event logs and it is difficult to analyse without Process mining tools. So once the activity sequence data is collected by an information system, then it is integrated with process mining tools like ProM for further analysis.
In the next step, we get to know the variation between processes. These variations occur because of manual changes or errors in process.
After the analysis on activity sequence of each case, process mining tools starts to merge these sequences. As variations occur, the actual process will be more complicated than the planned one. By this output, the company will understand where the process variation is occurring.
Traditional to Modern approaches:
By traditional approach, It need to analyse and design the processes explicitly building use of process modeling tool. But the downside of this approach is it resulted variation between the actual processes and the ones as perceived by designers. Other is it consumes lot of time and thus create mess.
By Modern approach, Instead of starting with an manual process design, it aims at extracting sequence data from “process execution logs”. Process mining techniques such as the Alpha Algorithm typically assume that it is possible to sequentially record events such that
— each event refers to an activity (i.e., a well-defined step in the process)
— each event refers to a case (i.e., a process instance)
Moreover, additional information can be added such as:
- Main resource, also referred to as originator of the event
- Time stamp of event
- Quantity of the event
Simple explanation of Alpha Algorithm
The algorithm examine the casual relationship observed between two events. It is too simple to be applicable to real-life logs plus It should NOT be taken as a benchmark.
Basic test for any mining algorithm: Rediscovery
Original process → Logs → Mining Algorithm → Mined process
Then we compare Original process with Mined process.
Application of Process Mining?
- Manufacturing (eg. Timely and Accurate delivery to a customer is the ultimate goal)
- Banking and Finance (eg. It is crucial to follow the rules and regulations and to be able to prove you have done so)
- Healthcare (eg. better distribution process to supply all over hospitals)
- Retail (eg. The success of retail comes from efficient business operations from supply chain, warehousing, forecasting)
- Telecommunications (eg. It helps in creating visibility to geographically disperse operations, identify bottlenecks and ensure that customers receive products and services on time)
- Etc….
Benefits
- Process standardization
- Reduced costs
- Optimization in lead time, reaction time, inter-dependent processes
- Cheaper and faster auditing
- Data informed decision making
- Faster reactions to non-compliant processes
- Faster Delivery in supply chain
So this was it for the scope of the blog. I will share advanced techniques in my future blog. If you find it helpful kindly Share with your friends who you think would be interested in.
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