DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION WITH PROCESS MINING -GUIDE

QPR SoftwareProcess KPI Reporting with Process Mining

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3 Ways in Which Process Mining Enables Digital Transformation

Although digital transformation is mentioned in just about every corporate playbook, many organizations have still failed to achieve the desirable outcomes with their digital transformation initiatives. Meanwhile, process mining has grown in popularity, as a way to increase the efficiency and understanding of enterprise business processes.

However, many have not realized the various ways in which process mining can be used to enable digital transformation in an organization. This guide offers three new and practical approaches to supporting successful digital transformation with process mining - by providing examples from QPR ProcessAnalyzer, QPR’s process mining software. The main themes discussed in this guide are:

1. Value stream mapping2. Agile organization3. Business transparency

ImproveDARE TO

WHY AND HOW?Process Mining

IncreaseTRANSPARENCY

ManageCOMPLEXITY

Understand yourPROCESSES

Make decisions based on EVIDENCE

Understand your processes and see how they contribute to business outcomes - in real-time

Uncover root causes of problems and get current evidence to make quick, yet thoughtful decisions

Increase the transparency of your operations: monitor and predict performance of the right KPIs

Get access to the right information during the most complex transformations, such as M&As.

PROCESS MINING FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Business leaders need to understand how their organization works, what to prioritize, and what to transform - holistically and continuously. Focusing on one aspect only, such as RPA, without understanding the big picture will only lead to messy processes and bots that are not working the way they are designed to, failing the planned ROI.

Business processes are key sources of information for understanding how businesses operate in reality, as well as great areas for cost reduction and increased efficiency. Process mining helps business leaders create the best version of their company - based on facts, not guesses. It clarifies: 1) How do our current processes work in realiy? 2) What needs to change, and 3) Did we achieve lasting change? If so, how well?

Process mining brings vital insight into processes and performance

QPR’s process mining software, QPR ProcessAnalyzer, draws data directly from your information systems (such as ERP, CRM and BPM systems) with built-in connectors. It then visualizes and analyzes process flows that take place in your organization, providing a holistic view of processes and identifying bottlenecks, variations, and underlying root causes of inefficiencies.

Process mining can be used for KPI reporting in any industry. QPR ProcessAnalyzer is currently used in 70+ processes (such as PtP, OtC, logistics, and service management) and includes ready-made solutions for use cases such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Digital Transformation, and IT and ERP Development.

PROCESS MINING FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Value stream mapping refers to visualizing all important steps of your process that deliver value to customers, from start to finish: you should understand what activities can add value to your customers, and avoid the unnecessary and costly steps in your processes that do not add any value to customers.

To map your value stream in process mining, you can check the value adding events rate. "Events" in process mining refer to activities that happen within operational processes, time stamps for the activities, and other relevant attributes. Events are, for example, that a purchase order is created, a shipmen is sent, or a patient at a hospital gets an x-ray or blood tests or pays for their visit.

In the screenshot below, where we use the Purchase-to-Pay process as an example, you will see the automatically generated flowchart of the process on the left side, as well as the total event count (light blue line) and the value adding rate (dark blue line) on the right side.

MappingVALUE STREAM

By right clicking the flowchart and simply choosing to see case attribute profiling instead of the process flowchart, you can choose to benchmark your value stream internally against a variety of attributes. For instance, choose company codes to benchmark different regions against one another regarding value adding events:

In the above example, we can examine the value adding event rate (and other KPIs) for the US.

Here, we've chosen to see the information for the UK instead.

PROCESS MINING FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

It's crucial to make your organization agile by understanding the changes around you and react rapidly to them. You also should have a continuous improvement mindset and keep monitoring your processes and changes in them - process mining helps in all of these areas.

With process mining, you get valuable information by checking for instance the process changes for event types, process changes for resources as well as the process changes for flows.

For instance, the process changes for event types below shows in blue colour events that take place after a point in time (that you decide) and in green colour the old events, i.e. the events that take place before this point in time. By monitoring these process changes, you can track process changes during certain review periods - days, weeks, months - whatever is most relevant.

Benchmark business areas by process complexity

Complexity makes thing difficult, slow and expensive. Unnecessary complexity is always bad. The Process Complexity - Variations chart benchmarks your operations using any available case attribute to present the level of complexity included in that business area. Large business areas with many cases naturally have more process variations, so the best performing areas are those with high amount of cases per each process variation.

ORGANIZATIONAgile

How many manual events are needed to complete a case?

The core objective of digital transformation is to reduce the amount of manual work, making processes faster and working ways smarter. The Digital Fit Rate Trend chart lets you to monitor the outcome of your new digital business models, robotic automation (RPA) initiatives and systematic efficiency improvements by showing the average amount of manual events needed to complete one individual case.

What is your end-to-end automation rate today and is it improving?

The Automation Rate Trend shows the progress and results of your RPA and automation efforts as a monthly trend. It is easy to see how automation rate is increasing as a result of RPA activities.

However, if the automation is not working as it should (which unfortunately often is the case), then the amount of other manual tasks within the process starts to increase.

This is often caused by rework, manual work for fixing events performed by bots and manual work based on customer complaints.

With this chart, you get a quick overview of your automation progress within the end-to-end process and visibility to your end-to-end automation rate over time.

PROCESS MINING FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Last but not least, process mining helps you achieve the long-term, comprehensive goal in your digital transformation journey: business transparency. In this chapter, you'll get to know a few helpful Digital Transformation presets for this purpose - however, you will also find the other pre-built advanced process mining analyses, such as Root Cause and Conformance analysis, very useful for this purpose.

Detect business areas with high amount of repeating events

If First-Time-Right is your goal, then this chart is perfect for you! The Repeated Events per Case chart lets you benchmark your business areas by the average amount of repeated events per case. By providing problematic areas with best practice examples from other areas, improving where it’s most crucially needed will be much easier.

Analyze the effect of repetition on process lead times

Repeating the same events multiple times causes long lead times. This chart shows the effect of multiple repeated events to the total end-to-end case duration. Cases with 10+ repeated events may easily take twice as much time to complete than cases without any repeating events!

TransparencyINCREASE BUSINESS

Complex cases have many events causing long lead times

One objective of your digital transformation initiatives may be to simplify your business. This chart can be used to build a business case for simplification - cases with a small number of distinct event types are likely to complete much faster than cases with many event types causing unnecessary complexity.

Identify root causes of poor performance and check process conformance

Although businesses strive to plan their processes according to the agreed policies (while taking into account stakeholder and regulatory requirements, process execution rarely goes according to plan.

The conformance analysis is one of the most advanced analyses in the BPM area, as you instantly spot process violations. QPR ProcessAnalyzer compares your as-is processes to your designed processes - the Design Model - and instantly presents conforming and nonconforming cases, conformance trends, reasons for deviations,and top violating variations. With QPR ProcessAnalyzer's Conformance analysis, you can easily edit the Design Model and the software will automatically update the analysis to check conformance with the new model. Moreover, you can check the best process variations and simply"auto create design model" based on these best versions.

With one click, you'll further see the Root Causes for the violations - the influencing factors behind the problems with the biggest business impact.

LEARN

More:Digital Transformation Webinar • Value Stream Mapping• Agile Organization• Business Transparency

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QPR ProcessAnalyzer Recognitions• Forrester Now Tech for Process Mining 2020• Gartner Market Guide Process Mining 2019• Gartner Market Guide for DTOs 2020

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QPR Software Plc (Nasdaq Helsinki) provides process mining, performance management and enterprise architecture solutions for digital transformation, strategy execution and business

process improvement in over 50 countries. QPR software allows customers to gain valuable insights for informed decisions that make a difference. Dare to improve.

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