Process Mining Overview: Which Departments Are Most Influenced Today

Process Mining is an emerging technology. And as such, it can make your company stronger, when embraced fully.

According to VentureBeat, “there’s no question that automation and artificial intelligence will profoundly reshape how work will get done.”

If you want to stay competitive, it’s a fact you need to face. New technologies such as Process Mining, the pre-step to fully efficient Robotic Process Automation, are already making their way into your company’s departments.

Here’s where and how!

Operations

By exploiting various performance improvement methodologies and techniques such as Lean, Six Sigma, or Kanban, operations managers and specialists strive for process excellence of all the various departments in a company.

Process Mining is a way they can uncover imperfections in processes and deploy these more traditional methods to improve upon them.

Eager for more knowledge? Here’s our Guide to Operational Excellence.

Production

Not every organization can afford to have its own operations department, therefore a lot of tasks regarding process improvements remain on the shoulders of the production and functional managers.

Keeping production processes transparent helps in the standardization and harmonization within all the facilities, while also pointing out the so-called “hidden factories”. Because if your Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is not 90% and more, there’s always room for improvement.

Purchasing

Procurement of materials and goods for further transformation into final products, and the follow-up payments, are one of the most commonly analyzed processes within the Process Mining field.

By applying Process Mining to the process, you can discover complexities and eliminate inefficiencies, manage supplier risk and minimize errors, while also creating the baseline for investment into enabling technologies. More on the Procure-To-Pay use case? Click here.

Customer Management

Taking care of your customers, especially in the age of complex and changing customer requirements accompanied by the eagerness for instant feedback, requires high process efficiency and ongoing improvements.

Where does Process Mining tie into all this? A customer journey map!

It’s an outline of all the points the customer gets in touch with when interacting with your company. With Process Mining, you can analyze and improve this experience from day one. You can use our Business Process Analysis Guide to learn more.

Finished? No, We’ve Just Begun

These are just the most common departments that are in touch with Process Mining at the moment. In the near future, the market will witness analysis of processes in such divisions as marketing, HR, legal, or R&D.

Truth to be told, many organizations focus on what should be going on in terms of processes, not what is going on. “Organizations are primarily interested in an improved ‘to be’ process, so often they have little interest in exploring ‘as is,’ or how the process is currently performed,” Harvard Business Review states.

With the current evolution of Process Mining, companies without clear strategy of improving their “as-is” process will weaken, if not lose their competitive advantage.

Don’t be one of them, and let us give you a helping hand in identifying the departments ready to meet the disruption, called Process Mining.