Introduction and challenges
End-to-end business processes such as O2C (order-to-cash) and P2P (purchase-to-pay) have grown too complex to efficiently improve with traditional process improvement tools and methods. Not only can transactional data easily become ‘big’, with thousands, or even millions of order or invoice line items processed every day, and the process is often dispersed functionally and/or geographically, and is often partially handled in-house and partially outsourced. As a result, the actions critical for on-time payment or delivery of individual cases may not be recognised by those involved in the course of their day-to-day activities.
Process Mining technology makes it possible to connect those disparate IT-systems such as CRM, ERP and MES, that contain the digital footprint of your transactional data, and visualise the process as it is actually executed. In many cases the ‘as is’ process is particularly difficult to map accurately, due to the many variants that exist in practice, and traditional brown-paper sessions typically fail to identify this. Process Mining technology identifies where processes deviate from the standard, will define the ‘to be’ process, analyse what actions to take, how to execute them (manually or automatically), and track progress towards business goals.
How we can help
We help our clients realise value from their process data by implementing the right solution to suit their business needs. Whether it is a simple process discovery, a one-time analysis or full implementation of an execution management system with process mining at its core, we can advise which solution would fit best, build it to work and, most importantly, train staff on how to leverage the technology for improved business results – from one use case at a time to scaling it throughout your organisation.
Implementations typically yield results faster than traditional methods – weeks rather than months – and there is no apparent limit to where process mining can be applied, with use cases in various industries (e.g. manufacturing, supply chain, finance, healthcare) and processes (O2C, P2P, accounts payable, accounts receivable, inventory management and many more).
Typical results include:
- Higher engagement from increased process transparency, increased accountability for improving process performance
- Cross-functional support for digital innovation and data-driven leadership
- Digital process insights and standard analysis for first time right/on time delivery or payment from day one
- Data and process-based business cases showing where improvement opportunities lie and how to exploit them
- Easy and sustainable continuous improvement, with trained employees continuing to drive business impact beyond implementation