PEX Network caught up with Nina van Krimpen, business process consultant at chemicals company LyondellBasell, to uncover how process mining can deliver business value. Ahead of her presentation at PEX Live: Process Mining 2021 in March, van Krimpen outlines why businesses should invest in the technology and offers expert advice on how to ensure these initiatives are a success.
PEX Network: In your opinion, why should companies invest in process mining?
Nina van Krimpen: Process mining provides end-to-end process transparency and visibility, helping organizations compare what they think is happening within their business with what is actually happening. The technology is also a great tool for global process owners to understand the level of standardization and maturity of end-to-end processes across a business.
Compared to standard reporting tools for processes such as business intelligent reports and dashboards, the beauty of process mining is that it offers insight into what you need to do to improve them and drive them forward.
PEX Network: Where did the idea of process mining stem from at LyondellBasell?
NvK: When I joined LyondellBasell in May 2020, process mining was already in use in purchase-to-pay. The organization saw there was a necessity to establish global process ownership, so having a tool that offered the ability to drive process standardization and alignment of functions, from supply chain to finance, was essential. Process mining was recognized as the ultimate way to achieve it.
PEX Network: In order for process mining projects to succeed, who in the organization needs to get involved?
NvK: Global process owners should primarily support process mining projects. The aim of the technology is to have a tool that will show you where you are and what you need to do. To ensure success you need a good driver in the organization and support from top management that understands the value of the tool. Having a nice new dashboard that looks great will not change anything if there is no organizational structure to support it.
That organizational structure means that the global process owner has ambassadors in functions across that process, be it supply chain or finance, together with the process mining team which will likely sit in a service excellence or robotic process automation (RPA) team. The process mining team needs to work closely with global process owners and function leads to give visibility over the actions taking place and how they drive the results that can be seen. Ultimately, what everyone across the end-to-end purchase-to-pay process wants to understand is the order rate and current performance on on-time delivery and payment.
At LyondellBasell the process mining team sits in a weekly global process owner meeting where we shed light on different types of insights to find out where the process problems are. From these meetings we understand the burning needs of the business and we identify new opportunities. Our approach is to support the global process owners’ goals and objectives and tie it back to the overall company vision and mission.
We are also currently working on two key projects: order-to-cash and working capital, following the recent acquisition of A. Schulman in February 2018 and Sasol in October 2020. These acquisitions brought a lot of new data into our systems and we need to make sense of it.
When you combine these two lines of work together, we could then optimize a process that had gone wrong because of the acquisitions for example, as maybe some elements were not aligned. The cascading effect may be that billing is done late, impacting in turn the overall working capital.
PEX Network: Finally, what can attendees expect from your session at PEX Live: Process Mining 2021?
NvK: I will show attendees how they can effectively use process mining to translate data insights into business value and separate the noise coming from the system from the drivers of inefficiency. I will share different views that we have created, how to deal with process mining to successfully identify where processes are going wrong and what needs to happen to improve them. In this sense, it is also a way to prepare for RPA because if your process is not stable and there are a lot of exceptions and inefficiencies in the system, then automating a specific process step is just a false benefit.
It is critical to understand what we can do with process mining and I will be showing how attendees can manage inefficiencies in the view to prepare for successful RPA initiatives.
A lot of organizations are going for RPA, as automating a process seems to be the easiest cost-reduction method. It works well for rule-based process but for complex ones like order-to-cash or purchase-to-pay that potentially have a lot of variations, process mining is essential to understand what needs to be done to standardize them first. If you venture into any RPA journey, you have to do it with a case that will bring value to the organization.
To dive into solutions that will improve operational excellence in your organization, sign up to the third edition of PEX Live: Process Mining.