Top-level executives are facing mounting pressure to achieve better outcomes in a constantly evolving business environment.
With global market uncertainty, companies are compelled to focus internally in order to discover fresh sources of revenue, reduce costs, and compete based on efficiency rather than solely relying on financial investments for ambitious endeavours.
Thankfully, the emergence of numerous digital tools and applications has unlocked a realm of opportunities for leaders to unearth hidden revenue streams, streamline operations, and establish leaner and more effective businesses.
Nevertheless, the enduring challenge lies in determining where to implement these new digital technologies.
It becomes crucial to identify processes that are ripe for transformation, pinpoint what can be automated, and ascertain which projects will yield the best value for the organisation.
Digital Transformation – Why Is It Needed?
In today’s highly competitive business landscape, where customers can easily find alternative options, the quality of every customer interaction and transaction is under scrutiny.
Merely having the best product is no longer sufficient. If competitors can provide faster and more convenient services, it poses a challenge for your business.
Furthermore, your internal processes are increasingly becoming a crucial factor for success. Whether it’s customer order processing, invoicing, quality assurance, or risk management, the efficiency of your workflows plays a vital role in acquiring and retaining customers.
To achieve optimal efficiency by eliminating unnecessary steps and automating processes, embracing digital transformation is essential. It involves breaking down information barriers and facilitating seamless information flow.
Digital tools provide a solution to this challenge and enable you to actively involve your workforce. By empowering them to excel in their roles and relieving them from mundane and repetitive tasks that hinder productivity, digital tools enhance overall performance.
Process Mining as a Core Keystone for Digital Transformation
Process mining technology serves as an ideal platform to aid in the discovery, monitoring, and enhancement of your processes.
By analysing event logs and available data, it constructs a visual representation of your workflows –
- Enabling prompt identification of issues,
- Identification of process bottlenecks,
- Detection of duplicated work, and
- Highlighting areas where process improvements are required.
Implementing process mining provides profound insights into the inner workings of your business, offering visibility into the actual happenings rather than relying on assumptions.
The capabilities of process mining technology encompass the following:
- Real-time monitoring of key performance indicators.
- Predictive analysis and scenario testing.
- Visualisation of how processes contribute to business outcomes.
- Standardisation of processes.
With process mining as a powerful ally, your digital transformation endeavours are bolstered with essential information for informed decision-making. You can simulate various scenarios to understand the impact of process changes on your business. You gain precise insights into the expected returns on your investments. Furthermore, you receive automated guidance on where and how to enhance your existing processes.
Process mining should serve as the foundational technology for all future investments and transformation initiatives, providing a solid basis for your organisation’s progress.
How is Process Mining Performed?
Process Mining offers significant benefits for businesses seeking to enhance productivity, efficiency, and capabilities through successful digital transformation.
While the abrupt migration to digital processes can be challenging for many enterprises, process mining provides a pathway to achieve business objectives, reap the rewards, and unlock new potential.
Here’s a breakdown of how it works:
Step 1: Process Identification
Process Mining begins by identifying time-consuming, flawed, and automatable processes. This step involves gaining an understanding of existing processes, as well as identifying areas for improvement, digital transformation, replacement, depreciation, and enhancement. This comprehensive evaluation helps organisations enhance process efficacy and overall business performance. Moreover, it can also help you get started with planning in a proper manner.
Step 2: Process Compliance
Process mining tools enable organisations to conduct various comparisons. Businesses can systematically compare their process workflows and execution models against standardised benchmarks. Through this assessment, errors, problems, risks, and areas for improvement can be identified. Once the issues have been found and dissected, you may resolve them properly right then or wait until the basic changes have been implemented.
Step 3: Implementing Changes
Following process identification, compliance, and standardisation, organisations gain a clear vision of their goals for digital transformation. This phase focuses on implementing improvements. Process mining tools facilitate activities such as variant analysis, bottleneck detection, process automation planning, and process reworking. These capabilities enhance process efficiency and enable organisations to achieve their objectives.
Step 4: Analysis, Brainstorming, and Debates
Transactional data serves as a valuable source for accurate process mining results. It provides objective insights for continuous improvement. Organisations can engage in ongoing analysis, gather feedback from stakeholders at all levels, identify opportunities for improvement, and engage in discussions on enhancing business processes and products. The mined data remains central to these debates and analyses.
Step 5: Recurrence and Scaling
After the initial process mining iteration, subsequent iterations become easier for the organisation. With each occurrence, the scope of process mining can be expanded. For instance, integrating Process Mining APIs with an enterprise’s ERP system allows for data extraction and further exploration of transformation possibilities. In any case, before you get started in this aspect, be sure to talk to your team!
Step 6: Process Standardisation
Having assessed, improved, and aligned processes to standards and trained professionals for digital enablement, organisations can even establish personalised standards based on industry benchmarks. This approach involves setting benchmarks slightly or significantly above the existing sector standards, differentiating the organisation in the industry and positioning it for excellence. This is basically the final step of process mining.
The Ending Note
Once your organisation has transformed its business structure, it can improve its processes as well as resource skill sets quickly. The end results of process mining can also –
- Help them in addressing the core inefficiencies of the business
- Improve their overall operational transparency and productivity
- Enable data-focused decision-making – precise and quicker decisions
- Simplify change management and procedural scaling
- Improve understanding of business processes and data intelligence
- Increase the speed of the procedures and elevates their overall quality
In all honesty, adding process mining tools within your system can make you highly efficient in the market. But, when it comes to combining it with digital transformation, that’s where the trouble begins. So, if you don’t want to make too much fuss, we’d ask you to opt for someone, such as cbs, who has experience in this aspect. Good luck!