Business processes are fundamental to the survival and proliferation of enterprises. They are developed to boost efficiency, comply with rules and protect the business. However, over time, more and more steps or rules that are added, turn processes into a problem. They become not only complex and cumbersome, but also excessively branched that they cause inefficiency, pose internal risks and, simply put, “get a life of their own” without anyone in the company being able to map them properly. 
Software-based solutions attempt to confront this necessary evil.

For instance, technology helps CFOs and internal audit teams quickly map processes, identify risks and prevent or fix issues (that resulted originally from lack of visibility into complex processes that evolved over time).  

The Role of Process Mining

Process Mining is a known and established business paradigm. In recent years, end-to-end technological solutions leveraged process mining in order to build process mapping and optimization capabilities tailored to different verticals and departments.

According to Gartner, “Process mining is designed to discover, monitor and improve real processes (i.e., not assumed processes) by extracting knowledge from event logs readily available in today’s information systems.”

In general, Process Mining solutions rely on data logs of fragmented events, to map out entire processes, and by that gain the visibility that is needed to identify inefficiencies and gain insights into required optimization steps. 

Such solutions help organizations extract information from ERP systems like SAP and provide detailed, data-driven insights on how their key processes perform, what loopholes they have, and how to finetune them.

Source: Gartner

The Gain

Outputs and insights shed critical light on how work is actually being done, how long it takes to complete tasks, which stakeholders are involved, what bottlenecks are created, what repetitive steps are still being done manually (despite being completely redundant), what risks aren’t being mitigated and what activities conflict with internal (or external) compliance requirements. Quite a lot of insights.  

AI algorithms can translate deviations into intelligence. For example, automated AI-based process mining solutions may easily detect that an entire process slows down every time an international payment above $100,000 is submitted into the system, while the continuation of the process shows it doesn’t make any sense in terms of compliance or risk management. 

Finance, Audit, and compliance teams that want to keep up should get a handle on what’s going on in the wide world of process mining, as it’s a key element in tomorrow’s finance operations.

We therefore put together a short and concise list of resources on the subject. 

So, without further ado, please take a few moments to peruse our list of recommended resources for anyone interested in Process Mining.  

1. Process Excellence Network Twitter: @PEXNetwork_Team

The PEX Network is a business transformation and process excellence community of more than 160,000 professionals worldwide. Their goal is to help members navigate the changing business landscape by publishing case studies and other relevant content highlighting different tools to improve their efficiency and agility. This includes events, articles, podcasts, webinars, and whitepapers and focuses on Process Mining and other digital transformation issues. New content is added at least once a week, so make sure you check them out regularly.

2. IEEE Task Force On Process Mining Twitter: @ProcessMiningTF

This website promotes the research, development, education, and understanding of Process Mining. Their goal is to increase awareness, promote usage and standardization, organize events and publish content about the Process Mining industry. The website hosts a treasure trove of resources, including case studies, books, movies, and even hosts event logs for Process Mining research purposes. Make sure you sign up for their quarterly newsletters, which feature articles and promote events related to Process Mining, with special emphasis on the activities of the International Conference on Process Mining (ICPM: @icpm_conf).

3. Process Discover

Extremely technical and analytical, the Process Discover blog features articles that deal with Artificial Intelligence and Process Mapping, two technologies that are central to any Process Mining software or platform. New articles are uploaded about once a week, but unfortunately, there’s no option to sign up for automatic updates or newsletters. This means that it’s up to you to drop in on them from time to time to see what content they’ve uploaded.

4. Process Mining Workbench

A mostly technical forum dedicated to helping developers use the popular open-source Process Mining toolkit, ProM. There are also tons of discussions and topics to take part in, and they’re not necessarily focused on technical implementation aspects. However, like many community-driven forums, navigation is not straightforward, and it’s hard to find your way around. That being said, there’s plenty of valuable information there for both Process Mining beginners and experts, so make sure to check them out.

5. BPM – Twitter: @BPMdotcom

Dedicated to anything and everything Business Process Management (BPM). BPM is the go-to publication for articles, news, research, and white papers related to Intelligent Automation and Business Processes. Content is focused on modeling, automation, execution, control, measurement, and optimization of enterprise business processes and activity flows. The publication hosts a wealth of resources, including the BPM podcast, a comprehensive Vendor Guide, a lively forum, whitepapers, and case studies related to BPM.

Process Mining leverages cutting-edge technologies like AI and big data to analyze business processes in large-scale enterprises. By leveraging Process Mining software, enterprises can gain insights into ways to improve their existing ERP processes. 

This innovative, technology-driven industry is quickly growing, with new vendors and research emerging nearly every week. Anyone interested in this fascinating field should stay abreast of the latest research, articles, and case studies. We put together this list of relevant resources to help you stay up to date with everything going on in Process Mining. We tried to make this list as comprehensive as possible, but we simply couldn’t include everything given the blog’s limitations. We invite you to share additional resources and recommend publications that you think could provide value to our growing community.