How process mining is driving conformance

Philippa Sides, head of lean process at Saint Gobain, shares one of her greatest successes in process mining and offers advice for any practitioners to get started with their own mining initiatives, ahead of her session at PEX Live: Process Mining 2022.

PEX Network: What has been your experience with transforming business processes through process mining? Can you share any success stories?

Philippa Sides: I introduced process mining into my organisation in 2020 and in its first year we used it in a number of scenarios. For the first time we were able to see the reality as opposed what we thought was happening in a process. Process mining was utilised in a project in finance and with the process intelligence (PI) data we were able to see the volume of cases flowing through different variants of the process, along with timings.

Utilising PI data in this project enabled us to pinpoint areas to focus on and drill down to the root cause. We could share this information with the process owner and evidence issues and root causes. This approach encouraged buy-in to the process improvement aspect of the project and we were able to reduce both inventory and cycle-time for the process.

PEX Network: You are participating in a panel which will discuss what has been achieved in process mining. From your point of view, what has been the most critical development in process mining in recent years?

PS: I think the most critical development in recent years has been the move from using process mining primarily for process discovery, as it is now also employed for process conformance initiatives. The ability to check conformance to a process and investigate the reasons for non-compliance, identifying why and how this process has deviated, enables real process transformation.

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PEX Network: What is your top advice for organizations looking to optimize business processes through mining?

PS: Understand your data landscape, what data is available and what data is not. Talk to your data colleagues, to find out how easy it is to source data and what their data maturity is. Is there a data catalogue, are data owners identified and are they able to work with you to integrate data into your process mining tool?

PEX Network: What key developments do you see happening in the process mining space over the next couple of years?

PS: I think we will see further development in task mining. Task mining is a really exciting area of process intelligence. Being able to identify the steps taken by a user for a task would enable you to identify the most common mistakes and understand what tasks could be automated, which would link in with robotic process automation development.

To hear Sides discuss this topic in more detail register for PEX Live: Process Mining 2022.