How Business Process Mining will deliver the return on investment that SAP clients have been pursuing for 30 years! In this blog, i will explain, what process mining is and how it works, how it can help your business extract value, why it's different to traditional business intelligence and finally, how Celonis compares in the market. Enjoy !
What is Process Mining ?
Do you ever get the feeling you have purchased a gold-plated investment, but you can’t get the ROI you were expecting?
Many clients express this feeling about their SAP system. SAP is a brilliant ERP system, the best available, but it needs expert tuning so that it can run at its maximum potential.
Perhaps it’s time to consider Process Mining which promises to provide Real Time Insight into what your processes are doing.
Hold on a minute, queue the sceptics!! If you are starting to yawn at the thought of another Process Modelling exercise (e.g., ARIS, Visio or BPM in Solution Manager) then keep reading as that was my initial reaction as well!! In this 2-part blog, I will describe my journey from sceptic to convert!
Now, you probably already have lots of BI Analytics which tell you the dollars and quantities of the transactions passing through your system. However, did you know that your ERP system also stores data about your business processes as well ? This data is completely underutilised. For example, every time a user posts a purchase order, the system also stores lots of information about what happened. For example, the time the posting was made, the user who made it, the type of transaction which occurred and a lot more.
A new body of research called “Process Mining” suggests we can construct what’s actually happening in our SAP system by analysing the “event logs” associated with the transactions. All that is required to do this is;
· A Case (unique identifier)
· An Activity (what happened)
· A timestamp (when it happened)
Now,
What if we could take this “Meta Data” about the process and use it to construct the Process Models in real time rather than going through than an elaborate modelling exercise?
What if we could construct the “Actual” Process Models that are happening in your business rather than a fanciful “Best Practice Model” which bears no resemblance to reality?
What if we could use these real-time Process Models to highlight inefficiencies, bottle necks and conformance issues in real time and give advice on how to improve performance?
That could save your business millions!
Enter Process Mining.
Sound like Star Wars stuff? Yes, but it’s happening now and with real world success stories. The convergence of new technologies like HANA In memory database, predictive analytics, machine learning and cloud has enabled this to become a reality.
Process Mining uses smart algorithms to reconstruct, analyse and understand the real process. It then uses Advanced Analytics to visualise the process flows which highlight the inefficiencies and suggest improvements!
In recent years, we have all been “hyperbolised” by analytics vendors regarding in memory computing, cloud, predictive analytics, internet of things, text analytics and now machine learning. Unfortunately, these technologies are just that, technologies. While they have been interesting to observe, learn and become skilled at, they have lacked the killer approach which made SAP so good in the first place: The applications!!
In my search to combine and use these approaches into something useful for clients I stumbled across Process Mining. In my 30 years of implementing SAP systems, I have been rarely impressed and often disappointed! Nevertheless, I’m calling it. Process Mining is a breakthrough approach to radically improve your Business Processes and finally achieve the ROI that SAP has promised for 30 years.
So how does Process Mining work ?
Process Mining works by using the historical data in your systems to produce a process model using a bottom-up approach. With process mining, you get a process model from actual transactional data. This way, your real process, and actual business rules can be discovered automatically.
Process Mining can be summarised as follows;
1 Process Discovery
· Whenever transactions are created in your IT system they leave a digital footprint
· This digital footprint can be converted to an “Event Log”
· Using Process Mining Techniques, the event log can automatically generate a “Discovered Process Model”
2 Conformance Checking
· You have a set of standard processes e.g. ARIS
· The “Discovered Process Model” can be compared to the standard process model
· Policy violations can be identified
· Deviations in the process can be identified.
3 Process Enhancements
· Performance Analysis allows bottlenecks and inefficiencies to be identified
· The goal is to improve the existing model
Check out our videos to learn more about how process mining works.
Can’t I do this with Data Mining or Business Intelligence?
In a word, No.
“Process Mining takes a Process-centric view on data science”
Process Mining and Data Mining both start from data. However, data mining techniques are typically not process-centric. Topics such as process discovery, conformance checking, and bottleneck analysis are not addressed by traditional data mining techniques. Process mining and data mining need to be combined to answer more advanced questions.
With Business Intelligence, the focus has been on the technical methods of getting the data, storing the data in a Data warehouse and making it available for queries. There is no linkage between the steps or activities of the process, just some simple measurement metrics.
What it has lacked is a methodology or framework for “What to do with the Data”. This is left up to the client. In the end, it is the process that matters (and not the data or the software). Not just patterns and decisions, but end-to-end processes.
Classical BI tools tend to show only tables, meters and graphs. They try to capture reality in a set of numbers and KPI’s. And that is not sufficient to understand your processes
Process Mining has evolved later than Data Mining or Business Intelligence and both these techniques are important underpinnings for Process Mining
What Software Systems support Process Mining
So now that we understand the concepts behind Process Mining, let’s look at some of the Software tools to enable it. The following table from HFS Research shows the top 10 Business Process Intelligence tools in the market.
Based on the HFS research Celonis is the clear market leader. Based on my own experiences in the last 5 years, Celonis has the best content to analysing SAP processes in an efficient manner. Their focus on solution engineering is why they are rated no 1 in “Business Value Creation”.
Stay tuned for part 2 of “Process Mining Bootcamp” where we will look in depth at Celonis and how to apply Process Mining to your SAP system. In particular, we will look at how to identify non-compliant processes at first glance, optimize throughput times by identifying bottlenecks and reducing manual interventions in process execution.
If you would like to understand what is happening in your processes in a matter of weeks not months then please contact us today at info@TEC150.com and take advantage of our real world experience and state of the art certification.
Best Regards
Geoff
Geoff Armstrong | Director of Process Analytics
TEC150 Pty Ltd – A Process Mining Company
Mobile: +61 419 495 669 |
Email: geoff.armstrong@TEC150.com
Website: http://www.TEC150.com
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