Article
Process mining for organisational agility
What is process mining and why do we need it?
During the pandemic, organisations are facing an unprecedented need to become more agile in responding to disruptions. Process mining offers increased visibility into business processes by creating a digital twin of the organisation. It is an effective way for you to harness your organisational data to provide valuable business intelligence, enabling fact-based, real-time decision-making.
In this first of a series of articles on process mining we cover what process mining is, why companies use it and what benefits it can bring.
How does process mining work?
Process mining is a technique that makes it possible to discover, analyse, and monitor processes by extracting readily available data from your underlying IT systems and tools. By collecting real-time event logs of processes across functions and systems, it enables you to build an end-to-end visualisation of your business processes and workflows. This allows for a quick and easy comparison between the ‘actual’ and ‘desired’ process state.
Through this comparison of event data and process models, it is possible to:
- Detect deviations early
- Identify bottlenecks
- Predict delays
- Recommend redesigns
- Enable faster decision-making
Increasing digitisation of processes is generating a gold mine of data. Smarter algorithms are leveraging this to provide insights. And faster computational capabilities make it possible to process the vast amounts of data, paving the way for the creation of a digital twin of your organisation.
What are the benefits of process mining?
Process mining reveals the underlying process that is being executed and this visibility allows you to identify many hidden opportunities to reduce costs, improve the customer experience and ensure process compliance.
Process mining tools have a wide set of applications and can be used for simple discovery and analysis by continuous improvement teams and business process owners. It can support ERP transformations and create a digital twin. It can also form part of an extensive digital transformation where advanced robotics process automation, artificial intelligence, and the embedding of process mining into your business’s DNA ensures world-class process execution.
What are process mining’s use cases?
At Deloitte we have a wide range of experience helping our clients implement process mining across a variety of business use cases.
One example is where we helped a global pharmaceutical company drive insights into their product lifecycle management process by leveraging the power of process mining.
What is a Product Lifecycle?
After a drug has been successfully launched the world remains dynamic. Regulators can require constant changes to products. Any change to the intrinsic product requires detailed planning, tracking, approval, and implementation. Regulatory documentation requirements cannot be missed and strict conformance with internal guidelines is crucial to remaining in control of the process. Every hour’s delay in the process of bringing a drug back to market results in a decrease in revenue – and potentially a patient not receiving their medication.
Why did the client want process mining?
The client wanted to leverage process mining to create transparency and insights into their product lifecycle management process. In particular they wanted:
- To enable agile product lifecycle management
- To ensure data-driven conformance checks
- Transparency on change control management
- To inspect selected change requests and change orders by brand, site and country.
Results of the process mining
Deloitte developed a proof of concept and value using process mining to help the organisation:
- Visualise the end-to-end process flows and bottlenecks
- Identify slow-moving change requests with early warning system
- Benchmark throughput time and focus on fixing the system, not just the delay
- Deliver more effective project management in a globally complex system
- Identify non-conforming behaviours
- Understand data for root cause analysis.
Deloitte can help you every step of the way
Deloitte is leading digital transformations globally and can help you along the way, no matter what your ambition or current maturity level. Process mining is a key tool to allow you to respond quickly to your specific market needs or challenges and make data-driven and fact-based decisions.
Deloitte Centre for Process Bionics
If you are interested in learning more about how process mining can bring significant process transparency, organisational agility, customer centricity and cost efficiency to your organisation, then please get in touch with one of our process mining experts.
