What is Process Mining?

Process Mining: The MRI of your business

Process mining works by extracting knowledge from event logs readily available in today’s information systems, in order to visualize business processes — and their every variation — as they run. Check out how process mining works for a more detailed breakdown.

Want to become a process mining expert, fast? 

Check out our free virtual process mining course, led by Godfather of Process Mining and Celonis Chief Scientist Wil van der Aalst.

There are many benefits to process mining:

We'll cover the benefits of process mining in more detail below.

Process Mining: From academia to the boardroom

10 years ago, process mining started out as an academic theory. Today, it’s a well-established business technology, used by thousands of organizations around the world, with hundreds more starting every day. 

It’s been widely recognized — by enterprises, analysts, and the media— as the way to get an X-ray of your business processes: a real, living, breathing picture of how your processes work. In 2023, process mining was given its own Magic Quadrant™ by Gartner®, validating its growing prevalence amongst enterprises.

Professor Wil van der Aalst refers to process mining as the bridge between data science (which includes algorithms, machine learning, data mining, and predictive analytics) and process science, which covers operations management and research, business process improvement and management, process automation, workflow management, and optimization.

Process mining is the technology at the heart of the Celonis Execution Management System (or EMS), enabling enterprises to fully understand how their core business processes run and find the hidden value opportunities, before taking intelligent, automated action to improve performance and unlock hundreds of millions across the enterprise.

What is a process?

Let’s get back to basics by defining processes first.

A process is a series of actions or steps repeated in a progression from a defined or recognized 'start' to a defined or recognized 'finish'. The purpose of a process is to establish and maintain a commonly understood flow that allows a task to be completed as efficiently and consistently as possible.

Every business process step leaves a digital footprint in your transactional systems in the form of event log data. It is using this data that process mining software works to create a living picture of what your actual processes really look like — which does not always match the definition you might have worked out in process mapping workshops.

Of course, some process steps don’t necessarily take place in a transactional system either — sending an email or opening a spreadsheet for example. Task mining is the technology that collects that user desktop data. Combined with Celonis process mining®, it gives the most complete view of how work gets done within an organization.

What are common business processes?

Common business processes include Purchase-to-Pay (P2P), Order-to-Cash (O2C) or Customer Service processes, for instance. And while nearly every company has some version of these processes as the backbone of their business, there are many others that support a company’s daily operations, including:

• Accounts Payable processes

• Accounts Receivable processes

• Procurement Processes

• Order Management processes

• Inventory Management processes

These are just a sample, of course. Moreover, different companies define certain processes differently depending on their business needs, the systems they use, and other variables.

By their nature, processes are not static — nor do they always follow the path defined for them. Even the best-made plans go awry, and over time these deviations can become the rule without attention to continuous process improvement and business process management.

Dynamic markets also force change: customer expectations, new product lines, acquisitions, changing geographies, and any number of other things can impact a process’ ability to perform at well as it should. This is where Celonis process mining® comes in, as it enables process owners to find and capture hidden value opportunities in their business processes by giving them complete real-time visibility. 

Process mining use cases

Process mining use cases are almost infinite given the technology cuts across multiple business functions and industries. For instance, Celonis process mining® can make the supply chain more resilient by eliminating inefficiencies and also has a big role to play in sustainability efforts. Any function can be made more efficient through this technology.

Common Celonis process mining® use cases today include:

• Process excellence to uncover hidden value opportunities, fast.

• Finance, to speed up transformation efforts and delivers quarter-on-quarter results.

• Supply chain, to help increase resiliency.

• Shared services, to drive the evolution from cost center to always-on value magnet.

• System transformation, to de-risk and accelerate all phases of migration journeys.

• Sustainability, to reduce shipping emissions and drive sustainable spend management.

These use cases are seen across multiple process mining customers in industries including automotive, consumer, energy, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, professional services, retail, telco and media, life sciences, pharma, travel and transportation.

To dive deeper into how your department or initiative can benefit from Celonis process mining®, take your pick from our solution pages.

Why process mining has become a business necessity

The era of ‘growth at all cost’ is over. Today, every single department in every company needs to cut costs and optimize for efficiency. Year on year, quarter on quarter, month on month.

So every department in those businesses has to optimize for efficiency. But while most departments intuitively know that their process isn’t quite working, they often don’t know how to find the value opportunities that really move the needle. 

Because their tools weren’t designed for it.

What process mining does better

Process mining helps you capture hidden value opportunities across your core business processes. 

It’s like an X-ray of your business, providing companies with the insights they need to not only visualize how their processes actually run, but understand where opportunities lie, which could have the biggest impact, and how to take action on them and measure the results.

There are several benefits to process mining. The technology enables you to:

The limitations of traditional process mining

Since its beginnings, process mining has helped thousands of companies improve the outcomes of processes across the organization. Things like:

• Unlocking millions in working capital in Accounts Payable or Accounts Receivable

• Maximize purchasing power in Procurement

• Boosting on-time delivery in Order Management

Until recently, process mining lined up all the objects and events that made up a process, item by item. This linear way of looking at processes offered a limited view. 

Let's take a sales order, for example. With traditional process mining, a customer has a relationship with their sales order. It's a one-to-one relationship.

But in reality this customer has not one, but three different sales orders. The sales order has many sales order items, and the sales order items are included in many sales orders. These are one-to-many - and many-to-many - relationships.

If you're only looking at your process from a single, linear perspective, orders easily get duplicated, effort is wasted, and value gets missed.

That’s why object-centric process mining is the next big frontier.