Both of process mining and business intelligence have one goal in common, helping decision makers make better and informed decisions about their business. That being said, the way they work is entirely different.
Process Mining, by definition, helps you to visualize your real business processes and compare it with your plan and theory. After that, getting the possibility to do actions on the insights you selected. Business Intelligence is about visualizing how your business works so you can identify the issues you would like to improve.
Process mining, on the other hand, can empower you to identify the root cause of the problem or bottleneck you are facing in a certain function.
What and When
Key input in business intelligence (and process mining too) is the what and the when. What are they key inputs for the report? Knowing what you would like to discover is a key and must be defined for both the BI tool and the process mining tool.
Why and How
The why really matters nowadays, asking department heads about their processes and they will say they have a solid grip on things, although asking individuals involved in the work, you will get various process deviations from each, making it subjective to individual point of view. Understanding why a deviation is happening, is a key to solving the issue – can be an invoice not paid on time, maverick buying increasing in a certain month, for instance.
Process mining let you understand how we reached to such deviation of the process, delay, or compliance issue. In most cases, it can suggest a solution, assign a task to the relevant stakeholder, or solve the issue by itself in the ERP system. This is a major differentiator towards the process mining side rather than the BI tool.
Data Utilization
Companies started to realize that they are sitting on a gold mine of data, having data scattered all over their current systems as SAP, Oracle, or Salesforce, it’s important now to make a better use of it and link the dots together, creating the real single hub for truth.
With data scattered everywhere it can be difficult to consolidate and make meaningful use of it through business intelligence solutions only, process mining helps in the consolidation and making a crystal clear insights out of the data you have across various systems.
Process mining nowadays is becoming a key component of enterprise’s organizational strategy, to discover, analyze, and take an action on your data and improve your current business processes to take your business to new heights of digital transformation.
What are the 4 main pillars for a successful Process Mining project?
