Weighing Up The Pros & Cons Of Process Mining

What Is Process Mining?  

Process mining can be an invaluable strategy to streamline business processes. The technique involves organizations mapping out processes to identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and optimization opportunities. Process mining tools are able to visualize processes by extracting data from event logs, providing accurate insights into a process’ performance.  

What Are the Advantages of Process Mining?  

This data-driven approach to understanding day-to-day activities can be hugely beneficial for an organization.  

1. Improved Efficiency: Using process mining exposes inefficiencies within an organization. This highlights the most advantageous areas to streamline, ensuring organizations invest time and resources into the correct projects.  
2. Increased Visibility: Process mining gives businesses a clear view of processes, making it simpler to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement. Improving process visibility can help businesses continuously improve and remain competitive.  
3. Reduced Human Touchpoints: As process mining is an automated process, there is less need for manual labor which allows the workforce’s talent to be allocated to other tasks. In addition, there is a reduced risk of human error, meaning the insights are generally more reliable.  
4. Compliance: As process mining can identify if a process deviates from the standard, the tool can assist with managing compliance within an organization. This can include internally established procedures as well as external regulations. This process standardization can increase consistency and scalability, whilst reducing compliance risks.  

What Are the Disadvantages of Process Mining?  

However, it is not as simple as implementing process mining solutions to reach operational perfection. There are some drawbacks to the strategy that businesses should consider beforehand.  

1. Cost: Like most tech solutions or tools, process mining can be expensive. These costs can include software, integration, and maintenance. This can be especially troublesome for small and medium-sized businesses. 
2. Leveraging Findings: Although a key benefit of process mining is the visibility it provides, that is the limit of its capabilities. To operationalize the findings that process mining uncovers, the organization itself must decide how to solve any inefficiencies. This often leads to a long and costly transformation journey, that could include projects such as tech implementation or organizational restructuring. Some organizations choose to add process improvement tools to their process mining solutions, to trigger task automation, however again this requires more money and time for integration. 
3. Data Reliant: To enable data-informed decision-making, process mining can only rely on the data an organization provides. Gathering the necessary data can be complicated and time-consuming, especially if you are using multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer channels, and complicated pre-existing processes.  
4. Limited Information: Although making data-informed decisions is beneficial, process mining cannot capture feedback on a human level. This may result in increased resistance to change as the users who are interacting with the processes on a day-to-day basis are at risk of not having their experiences considered.  

This is just a summary of the benefits and drawbacks of process mining. If you are interested in learning more about process mining, whether you are just beginning your journey or are looking to improve, SSON is delighted to once again be hosting the Process Mining and BPM Digital Summit. The event will include valuable insights from industry leaders, beginner-level sessions, and a look into innovative technologies. Secure your place today!