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The what, why, and how of using process mining to become a fully automated enterprise™

A Practical Guide to Process Mining

In this e-book, we’ll cover:

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What process mining is, and why it’s important

How it works What it means for automation

Real world applications

How you can get started

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While you try to improve your business processes through techniques like process mapping, your systems store loads of data about how your processes actually work.

All you have to do is know how to find it.

The challenge is that, until recently, people didn’t know how to find it, or didn’t have an easy way to get it. So that data went undiscovered and unused. Process mining is changing everything. It takes the digital footprint of a process within your enterprise systems and automatically makes it visible to you.

You can see in an instant how your business processes actually perform, you can see who did what and when, and you can view every process variation, bottleneck, and exception. For the first time, you have accurate and up-to-date information to make better decisions about how you optimize and structure your processes.

Sounds like magic, right? Well, it’s not! It’s science and it’s here.

Do you get the impression that your enterprise applications are trying to tell you something? They are.

Where are your processes now, and where do they need to be?

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Digital footprint of a process

Pay Invoice

Receive Invoice

Process Invoice

Final Check of InvoiceApprove Invoice

Who should read this e-book?

Process mining is becoming an integral technology for a growing number of businesses across the globe. Although process teams have traditionally been tasked with process improvement and optimization, business users are increasingly becoming involved in making sure their processes work for them.

We wrote this guide with the following people in mind:

� Automation teams looking to strengthen and enhance existing initiatives

� Continuous improvement teams

� Business leaders and users

� Internal audit team

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Efficient processes that are strategically aligned to the business have long been a goal for organizations worldwide. The secret to increasing productivity, reducing costs, and driving efficiency, lies in the ability to get the most from your mission-critical processes.

In the past, there has been one small problem: organizations have struggled to gain full visibility and accurate knowledge into how their processes actually perform.

Until now, process improvement for many organizations has involved traditional business process management techniques such as process mapping. Think time-consuming workshops and interviews. Such methods are often subjective, lack relevant process data, and are based on information that

becomes outdated as soon as the mapping project closes out.

Process mining changes all this by tapping into a data source that has always been there. Most of your enterprise applications (like SAP and Salesforce) record every activity and transaction that happens within each stage of a process. We call this event data, and this data forms the basis for process mining (but more on that later).

Simply put, process mining chronicles your process from start to finish, revealing the various paths a process takes.

It gives insight into bottlenecks and unnecessary rework, which tells you a lot about how efficient your processes are. Or aren’t.

What is process mining and why is it important?

Happy path Actual processAccording to AI Multiple, citing a Forrester report, 37% of decision-makers report delays to their digital transformation initiatives due to misunderstood processes (1).

Figure 1: The expected process vs. the actual process

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Everyone has their unique way of getting work done, and it’s normal for people to approach a task in different ways. That’s not a bad thing, but over time, you might start seeing excessive levels of variation in the process, to the point where it weighs the business down.

Leveraging something you already have, the event data, process mining gives you the opportunity to shape and create efficient processes. And optimized processes provide a better experience for your customers, delivered by happier employees.

Process mining allows you to see the ‘as is’ of your current processes and provides the insights on how to move it to where you want the process to be. The analytical capabilities built into process mining help you monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure your process outcomes are always aligned with your business outcomes. For instance, a strategic and company-wide goal may be to improve customer retention rates.

With process mining, you can track how long an order takes to process, your on-time and in-full delivery rates, pinpointing the exact root cause of delivery problems, which you can quickly correct or eliminate.

“Process mining is a foundational imperative for any organization interested in orchestrating efficient operations.”Prof.dr.ir. Wil Van der AalstGodfather of Process Mining

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Process mining delivers essential benefits including:

� Surveys processes across your enterprise at high scale and minimal human effort

� Helps you zero in on automation-ready bottlenecks, deviations and inefficient processes

� Leverages data to boost the ROI from automation

� Provides easy-to-understand dashboards for fast reporting to business stakeholders

� Continuously monitors processes to measure impact of improvements and ROI

� Democratizes process data so employees have greater control over processes

� Simplifies compliance with full audit trails and reporting

� Provides a single source of process truth, reduces silos between departments

The goal is to fully understand your processes, fostering a cycle of continuous improvement that aids transformation initiatives, primarily through automation.

How does it work?

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There has been a heated debate for some years over the role automation plays in business and society. That debate is now over. The question is no longer ‘should we automate?’ but ‘how can we use automation to maintain and grow our business?’.

According to a Gartner press release, Gartner estimates that almost 69% of routine work done by managers will be completely automated by 2024. (2). The benefits of automation have stretched past freeing staff by removing mundane tasks. It has become business-critical. Core processes – such as order-to-cash (O2C) or purchase-to-pay (P2P) – have to be as lean, agile and responsive as possible if your business is to survive.

The growing demand of process mining signals a new evolution in automation, as organizations transition towards the fully automated enterprise™, where robots get to do all automatable tasks. Not only are people freed from repetitive work, they are empowered to create their own automations. Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into automations improves process efficiency, employee productivity, and business decision-making.

For this level of automation to be effective, you must have complete visibility into core processes. You must know where the process is today, where you need it to be, and how you can move smoothly and effectively between the two states. That requires process mining.

Along with process mining and AI, robotic process automation (RPA) is one of the foundational elements of the fully automated enterprise. While each of the technologies offer incredible benefits to an organization, you can realize their full potential when they are integrated.

Firstly, process mining opens the door for RPA initiatives by supplying accurate process insights and opportunities for automation. This enables you to identify the most time-consuming and inefficient steps within a process to pass to a software robot. As the robot runs, you can see its performance, how it affects your process, and what further automation ideas you could leverage to maximize process efficiency. Using process mining, you can identify the best path through a process, and, when the process changes, the automation can adapt quickly, and remain effective.

What does process mining mean for automation?

McKinsey, in their 2017 report “A Future That Works: Automation, Employment, And Productivity,” estimates that $3.6 trillion of work is automatable (3).

Process mining provides many benefits to automation initiatives:

� Provide full context and end-to-end perspective needed to improve processes and make sure automations deliver results

� Identify the most valuable, impactful places to insert automation within a process

� Continuously monitor automation performance and ROI

� Drive better business outcomes by linking business rules with automation assessment

� Improve auditing and compliance through process comparison, analysis and validation

Enterprise applications that process mining can connect to (include but not limited to):

Business processes suitable for process mining (include but not limited to):

Findings in Forrester’s report “Future of Jobs, 2027: Working Side by Side with Robots,” indicate that automation will create 14.9 million new jobs by 2027 (4).

SAP

Oracle JDE

ServiceNow

Salesforce

Oracle Peoplesoft

SAP Ariba

Oracle EBS

Workday HCM

Service Max

Order-to-cash

Accounts receivable

Purchase-to-pay

Accounts payable

Production

Quality management

Meter-to-cash

Service/Incident management

Claims management

Lead-to-order

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Process mining and automation in four steps

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Until recently, process mining has really been the reserve of process improvement teams, but now the software is helping to democratize process improvement. By displaying the results of process mining on intuitive process graphs and dashboards, business managers and users can take greater control of their own daily processes and workflows for the first time.

There is no such thing as the perfect process. In fact, there’s no such thing as a static process. Your processes are constantly evolving and changing over time. Process mining ensures you’re able to deliver processes that meet your current needs, so you can quickly and smoothly adapt as your business changes.

Integrated process mining and automation solutions are designed to follow these four steps for effective and sustainable transformation.

The secret to process mining is its ability to use digital footprints left behind in applications to discover how your processes work. Every enterprise system captures event data related to your processes. Process mining reads this data and automatically transforms it into an event log. This event log contains three key pieces of information vital for process mining: an activity (what happened), a time stamp (when it happened), and a case ID (unique case identifier). From the event log, process mining visualizes the process in a process graph, revealing variations, bottlenecks, and exceptions. Where previously this would have been a laborious task, process mining does it automatically.

The visualization capabilities built into process mining helps you zero in on what should be optimized, how to do it, and what the return on your efforts will be. But visualization is not enough. What it comes down to is what you do with your findings. Automation is proven to quickly and impactfully transform your business. There are other measures that can dramatically improve processes, for example, retraining people, or removing extra steps in the process. Improving processes before automation will help you build stronger and more durable automations. It’s not always black and white either, you might also need a combination of automation and other solutions. Process mining gives you the complete picture, so you know exactly what’s required to improve the process.

You’ve made some changes, so it’s only natural you’d want to check whether it’s made a difference. When you deploy a robot to one part of the process, you often don’t know the effect on the rest of the process. That’s where process mining can identify any bottlenecks that have just been shifted further down the process. It provides much needed end-to-end process context for automation. You can also monitor your processes using custom business logic, to solve business problems that are unique to your organization.

After monitoring, it’s important to be proactive when it comes to any new findings. Why not use an alerting framework to immediately inform you of unwanted process deviations? You can bring a human or robot into the loop to quickly rectify process problems. This instant and continuous overview of your processes gives you a solid foundation to remain agile to constantly changing external conditions. Whether it’s new technologies, new legislation, a new competitive situation, or economic changes, you can act fast and stay ahead of the curve with process mining.

1. Discover 2. Optimize/Automate 3. Monitor 4. Act

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Every branch of financial services is highly regulated and strong compliance management is essential. Process mining provides immense help in these areas with typical financial processes analyzed including loan approval, risk and investment management, fraud, and consultancy. Some leading companies within the financial services industries use process mining to surface new cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

Real world applicationsEvery industry can benefit from process mining, with some already seeing widespread adoption of the technology, including:

Telecommunications has become a very customer-focused industry. As markets worldwide continue to de-regulate, telecom organizations are increasingly innovation-oriented to attract and retain customers. With short innovation and product cycles, telecoms companies need highly efficient and agile processes, making process mining an obvious choice. Client acquisition, sales and billing management, and service procurement are just a few of the processes where process mining is delivering results.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for extremely flexible and digital processes within healthcare to handle vast increases in demand for testing, treatment, and health services. With more focus on the patient journey and patient-centric healthcare, process mining is helping connect services to the patient, improve their experience, and optimize performance for hospitals, labs, social care, and other healthcare providers. Process mining is combining with automation to reduce or remove manual processes and repetitive paperwork to give doctors and medical staff more time with the patient.

Manufacturing is undergoing rapid change through the application of disruptive digital technologies. The days of mass production are slowly being replaced by carefully managed inventories based around personalization and customization. This is altering all parts of the manufacturing process from how materials are sourced, where and how products are manufactured, how products are delivered to the customer, and how the customer is serviced. Lean processes have been a feature of manufacturing for many years so it was clear that process mining can help augment and enhance approaches that manufacturers were already following.

Logistics and the supply chain are set up for process mining. The industry has always been tasked with doing things better and faster while reducing costs. The recent pandemic also identified the need for flexibility and resilience. Increased digitization within global supply chains means that each step within logistics processes has to be carefully analyzed and improved using process mining – both within the organization and with its trading partners and logistics carriers. The processes where process mining is being applied include order-to-cash, purchase-to-pay, material, stock and delivery processes, and quality management.

Financial Services Telecommunications Healthcare Manufacturing Supply chain and logistics

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Purchase to Goods Delivery Accounts Payable

Let’s take a look at how you can use process mining to transform the P2P process.

P2P is a core process for most companies that, when deployed strategically, drives value and profitability in the business. It covers every step that you take from deciding to purchase an item to paying the supplier.

Process mining in action: Purchase-to-pay (P2P)The high level process looks like this:

Create purchase requisition

Create purchaseorder Goods delivery Invoice receipt Payment & billing

Now, let’s look at a before and after transformation scenario:

Before transformation:

Your inefficient P2P process meant that the rest of the supply chain, and potentially end customers, suffered. The unoptimized process also impacted your ability to manage working capital and cash flow. Manual work, rework and exception handling resulted in costly errors, not to mention dissatisfied employees.

Discover pain points with process mining

Optimize the process through automation

Monitor with process mining

Act to keep processes on track

Long purchasing cycle time due to bottlenecks in the purchase requisition (PR) and purchase order (PO) process

Robot handles PR/PO approvals below a threshold, a person manages PR/PO approval above the threshold

Purchase order cycle time Alert your purchasing manager whenever PR/PO approval is above the threshold and needs manager approval

Supplier delivery delays Use findings from process mining to evaluate supplier performance and share results to create an improvement plan with quantifiable goals

Supplier lead time

On-time and in-full delivery rate

Alert your purchasing manager whenever a supplier delivers late

Inability to capture early invoice payment discounts

Robot runs the payment process to ensure payment happens at the optimal time

% of discounts captured

Invoice processing time

Alert your accounts payable officer whenever a payment is at risk of being delayed

Long cycle time to process invoices due to incomplete or missing data

Robot runs the payment process resulting in higher accuracy and faster invoice processing time

Invoice exception rate

Invoice processing time

Alert your master data manager whenever there is an exception to be handled, for example missing supplier information

Examples of P2P transformation with process mining and automation After transformation:

� You’ve improved throughput time, optimized inventory and safety stock levels

� Automation has increased accuracy and reduced errors, freeing people up to work on other value-added work

� You’ve improved supplier relationships and in turn, their ability to deliver on time

� You can now capture early payment discounts, enhancing the cash position of the company

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The O2C process is a core process that starts with creating a sales order and ends with invoice settlement.

Process mining in action: Order-to-cash (O2C)The high-level process looks like this:

Now, let’s look at a before and after transformation scenario:

Before transformation:

Your O2C process was slow and customers were getting frustrated with your inability to deliver orders on time and in full. Manual hand offs in the process resulted in unnecessary errors and time-consuming follow up for employees. Poor visibility into the process meant that systemic process issues went unnoticed and worsened over time. Late processing of customer invoices obstructed your ability to optimize working capital and cash flow.

Discover pain points with process mining

Optimize the process through automation

Monitor with process mining

Act to keep processes on track

Bottleneck creating sales orders Deploy an order processing robot

Sales order cycle time Alert the responsible customer service representative whenever an order hasn’t been processed by the robot

Discrepancy between actual goods issue date vs. planned goods issue date, delaying outbound deliveries

Robot creates outbound delivery and transfer order, person picks the order in the warehouse. Once completed, a robot can post goods issue for outbound delivery

Overdue outbound deliveries Alert shipping specialist whenever a delivery is ready to be picked

Customers not paying invoices on time

Identify the root cause of late payments, i.e., time between shipment and billing creation is too long, delay in sending invoices, disputed invoice amount, unpunctual customers. Deploy a robot to generate and send invoices, so invoices are always on time

Invoice creation and clearing lead time

Days sales outstanding (DSO)

Whenever there is an invoice sitting idle, trigger a robot to handle invoice processing

After transformation:

� You’ve reduced the time it takes to unblock invoices and sales orders from credit block

� There are fewer costly errors in the delivery process

� Your customers are happy as they’re getting their orders on time

� There are less delays in your wider supply chain

� You’ve optimized your invoicing process and cash flow

� Your employees are happier due to less repetitive and manual work.

Examples of O2C transformation with process mining and automation

Order to Shipping Accounts Receivable

Create SalesOrder

ManageCredit

Fulfill SalesOrder Ship Order Invoice Receive

Payment

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Everest Group has named UiPath as a Leader in process mining in its report “Everest Group Peak Matrix® for Process Mining Technology Vendors 2020” (5). In addition, UiPath has been recognized by analysts for a number of years as a leader in Robotic Process Automation (6).

Trusted by hundreds of organizations worldwide, UiPath Process Mining is one of the most comprehensive and feature-rich available today.

UiPath. A global leader in process mining and RPA

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Key benefits include:

� Captures data from widely used enterprise systems and applications, as well as legacy and custom systems

� In-built data transformation capabilities without the need for external integrators or SQL coding

� 60 pre-built dashboards to accelerate development and process analysis

� Integration with UiPath Orchestrator to directly trigger bots to handle tasks

� Integration with UiPath Action Center to directly alert people with human-in-the-loop capabilities

� Custom business tags to automatically detect and flag undesirable process behavior

� Proprietary process graph for user-friendly and intuitive process analysis

� Anonymization algorithms ensure data privacy and compliance

� Process-specific connectors and apps to accelerate deployment and lower implementation costs

� Full DevOps environment to simplify maintainability

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UiPath “are ahead in developing superior process mining capabilities, with greater focus on ease of use for business users, integration with enterprise applications, accuracy in process model generation, and analytics and dashboarding capabilities … They have a vision to drive enterprise performance and improve customer experience using a data-driven approach to process mining.”

The Everest Group

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UiPath is one of the very few automation providers with the capabilities to combine process mining with task mining. While process mining utilizes the event data from your enterprise applications, task mining allows you to see exactly the activities individual employees are executing within the process.

Talk to one of our experts. If you want to learn what process mining can do for your business, just reach out to us, we’d be happy to show you.

See how it works. Watch this short and comprehensive demo video to see how an integrated process mining and automation solution can help you boost efficiency across your business

Creating a 360-degree view of core processes

What’s next?

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Enroll in the UiPath Academy. Continue learning about automation and process mining with our free Academy training courses. Whether you’re a developer, data scientist, executive, or an analyst, there’s a course for you.

Task MiningDesktop capture of tasks performed by employeess

Process MiningProcess insights from business systems like

ERP and CRM

360ºProcess

Awareness

System Data

User Data

Figure 2: Combining process mining with task mining

Taken together, process mining and task mining provide a complete, 360-degree view of the process. You can see instantly what people are doing, the effect that it has, and how things can be improved.

You’ll also see how your process changes are working, whether your targets are being met, and

if your employees have accepted those changes and are now following the new process steps.

At UiPath, we believe a combination of enabling technologies working in tandem is key for our customers to become a fully automated enterprise. UiPath Process Mining has been developed to assist teams to continuously

discover and monitor their automations and processes. Whether you are part of a continuous improvement team, an RPA lead, a process owner, or a process analyst, process mining provides the essential foundation for successful transformation programs.

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