Can you please explain how using data can help you to understand the actual process?

Over the past few years we have been heavily focused on getting insights from the data.

 Firstly, significant efforts were put in place to get to a globally recognized and reported KPI structure and reporting set, linked to benchmarks, process and value stream maps. This moved us from perception and gut feeling conversations to fact based focused discussions.

Secondly, we invested in Celonis as a process mining tool which gives us true clarity on the actual process end to end. With this we continually identify opportunities to reduce costs, improve effectiveness and drive compliance. It gives us close to real time views, allows us to effectively estimate benefits of change and more importantly measure the benefits of change after the event. 

What tangible benefits has process mining brought?

With the ability now to review and identify the highest priority issues and their root causes, it allows us to take immediate actions driving improvement in OWC, costs and compliance. To date, the use of process mining has, for example, supported us in driving up on time payment of suppliers, payment term standardization, reduction of short payment terms, and probably most significantly reduction on rework activities giving FTE savings and reduced admin in the organization.

We continue to focus further on the above and are now looking at identification of automation opportunities, the streamlining of further transformation activity and expansion to other processes.

What are the main challenges with making process mining even more effective?

One main challenge is the data and ensuring you have skilled data and process resources to make sense of it and then communicate insights effectively. Getting the data in Celonis is 5% of the job, making sense out of the data, customizing it for your company, cleansing it and then effectively presenting results to get action is the 95%.
Another challenge is convincing management to invest in opportunities identified , it is often difficult to ensure you get the right people in the room to agree on taking actions and provide the necessary mandates to enforce required change. However, I am glad to say it does become easier when you can present the issues transparently with process mining.

Finally, embedding use of the tool with the business, providing the right governance, access and training is critical for the ongoing success, moving from project status to ongoing operational use.

Could you share some insights on future technology opportunities using process mining and data?

With process mining tools and similar technologies now advancing to allow real time insight into process, we will move more and more into the preventive, predictive, and transformational opportunities in the process. Linking with AI and specifically machine learning, we’ll see a move from tooling being used as a historical process analysis tool to an intelligent tool used to automate process analysis, support strategic decision making, and drive fundamental process changes in an organization.  

What would you like to achieve by attending 12th P2P and Robotic Process Automation Strategy Conference?

The area of Robotics and AI will have huge impacts in business processes. We now see some first indications of these benefits and I feel we are at the start of the exponential curve in development of these tools and techniques. No one truly knows what this will look like in the future, but hearing from where others are now and sharing ideas on future helps provide insights and inspirations in taking the next steps.