Process Mining

In conversation the other day, a colleague suggested that I “pay attention to what I’m paying attention to.”  Not only is it difficult to come up with better advice, but it is the perfect introduction to talk about process mining, which is a process for paying attention to your processes.

Organizations invest in process mining software to discover, monitor and improve real processes by extracting knowledge from event logs readily available in today's information systems. Good process mining tools offer algorithms and visualizations of the data for process discovery, task mining, conformance checking, social network/organizational mining, automated construction of simulation models, case prediction and history-based recommendations.

Operations professionals use process mining to see if their processes are functioning as intended, and if not, provide information to justify and allocate the necessary resources to optimize them. They can also uncover opportunities to incorporate robotic process automation into processes, expediting any automation initiatives for a company.

Starting in December 2020, IBM began collaborating with myInvenio to integrate process and task mining technology as part of the IBM Cloud Pak for Automation. Integrating process mining capabilities enables enterprises to enhance operational processes and functionality in the following ways:

• Pinpoint activities that should be automated (e.g. by an RPA bot).
• Use BPMN diagrams from process mining to start documenting to-be processes in BlueWorks Live.
• Import BPMN diagrams from process mining into workflow as a skeleton automated workflow.
• Use BAI operational data store as input into process mining to analyze improvements in processes that emit BAI events.
• Wrap AI around mining results and use machine learning to identify patterns and suggested next steps.