Is it possible to increase the degree of automation through effective process mining?

Anyone who has been in process management for a little longer knows that it is easy to talk about processes and their optimization. The truth is that reality is much more complex when it comes to structuring and automating processes.

It is the combination of data mining and process management that reveals the potential for process optimization.

Wil van der Aalst, professor of computer science at RWTH Aachen University and recognized 'godfather' of process mining, answered the question of what the goal of process mining is in an interview: "The goal of process mining is to analyze data to automatically derive process models that show where exactly bottlenecks, deviations or delays occur. By means of this diagnosis, the processes in the company can be improved."

So before we automate and optimize processes, we need an objective view of existing processes and possible process blockers.

Here, the well-known Pareto principle applies: 80 percent of all cases usually run error-free through a process. But it is precisely the last 20 percent that have much more variability and that are ultimately the cause of all problems and delays in a business process. Classic process management is often limited to the 80 functioning percent, but the potential for optimization lies in that 20 percent.

In order to shed more light on these, it is necessary from our point of view to check on several KPIs. The optimization and possible automation of p2p processes, for example, depend on several factors:

• Delivery methods – How many invoices are still sent by post?
• OCR – What is the degree of recognition of digitally delivered invoices/delivery notes that could be validated without manual work? Here we would like to refer to a possible full-text analysis within SAP.
• Background posting rate – Which documents could be posted in the background because they did not have to go through any manual steps from entry to payment release?
• Document changes – How many changes were made per document? What are the reasons for the document changes?
• Leadtimes – What is the processing and waiting time for individual workflow steps/invoices?

All these key performance indicators help you to understand your business processes to discover optimization potentials. We are happy to convince with a PoC.