Session Information:

Beyond Process Mining

During the last decade, Process Mining has been established as a powerful technology to achieve insights into complex business processes. “Switching on the light” has allowed companies to identify and remediate process inefficiencies. However, transparency is not a purpose of its own. Companies strive for Value, which is achieved e.g. through elimination of execution gaps, improved financial performance or smart sustainability levers.

In his presentation, Dr. Reinkemeyer will address the impact beyond Process Mining: technologies which leverage insights for proactive alerting, intelligent automation and simulation. Methodologies to frame and sustain value such as value trees, Masterplans and Centers of Excellence which serve as an internal accelerator to drive process transformation. In this evolution, Process Mining is the foundation which needs to be intelligently complemented to drive value for companies.

Session Transcript:

Munich, in Germany, today, I'm very excited about having him join us.

You'll kick us off.

But tremendous presentation on Process Muggy and I'm talking about mister Lars ... Meyer, who is here with us. He is one of my favorite speakers on this topic, a Global thought, an industry leader in the subject, a real privilege to have him with us over 20 years of industry experience. As a senior executive, a seamless. he established a Global Center of Excellence supporting a user community of more than 6000 active users.

Is the editor of the book Process Mining in Action, published by Springer in 20 20 with 12 operational use cases from companies such as BMW, Seamounts and Uber.

He joins the longest in January of 2021, as the Vice President of customer Transformation to support customers on their transformation journey. And it's a real privilege for us, to have Lars with us and sharing his expertise with our global audience today. Thank you so much for that, Lars.

Thank you for having me, and very excited to be here.

Probably could only be more excited to be here in person and made to everybody in person.

But I think one of the advantages of these virtual events is that people can gather from all around the world are really impressive to have people from Dubai, from the Philippines, from the US. Obviously, from Bangalore, I've heard, so it's really, it's a pleasure to share some of the experiences, which I've been able to gain the last couple of years here with you on process.

For the next 35 minutes, I'd like to talk about what I kept phrased as beyond process mining.

Since my experience of press mind, which has been a couple of years now, I think process mining is an exciting foundation or execution management, I think ...

Siding Foundation for a higher purpose, which is about operational efficiency, which is about business process improvement, and that's why I've labeled my presentation here beyond process mine.

So let's start with a little back looking back on the evolution of processes mining in the last decades here.

And actually process mining was invented late last millennium.

They can the 99 is, which I tend to call the Dark Ages, since in that time, there was no lever for any organization to get a full transparency about actual business processes, to get a full transparency about event logs as they happen.

But what people had to do back, and that's our ages, was to have stopped watching, to apply business process modeling, to plan basically inside, this is how I believe a process goes. But reality often looks very, very different and much more complex.

So, earlier this the this millennium, the first light came on, mine was switched on, with the initial process, mining use cases, where some companies started developing software, which allows to take the event logs from the actual transactional systems. So, to look into a transactional system and see what has happened there in respect of a purchase order, confirmation on a processing, and, thus, visualize the actual way how business processes are going through an organization. And this will be called process mining and have some first insight in that respect.

Then, the last decade was the phase which I call the leveraging insight face since this is where companies started to work on this insight and drive business value.

Like Siemens, we had a great showcase back in 20 18 where we use the audit to cache inside to understand how our customer artists actually process across the organization And then to drive impact with an increase of 24% increase of automation, 11% reduction and rework and 10 million fewer touches.

So basically applying this x-ray, often the organizational process of organizational processes, applying a therapy, and then drive value with this, with this insight.

By the way, this is process mining, which looks into the backend systems, compared to task mining, which looks into recording front office work.

Where people, how are people processing, or executing certain things that were processed money here, has been tremendously valuable to understand from the back end system, Millions of the actual process follows And drive, then value on that, that this is not what process mining stood. But it's now moving on with what I call the digital enabled organization. And this is all about enabling organizations to execute business processes in a smarter, more efficient, faster manner, and to enable organizations fest to be more efficient.

So, with that, I'd, here, it's basically, the sense that, to date to till probably 1, 2 years ago, the focus has been on what happened. So, leveraging traditional process mining to understand what has happened in my organization wide, that a customer delivery come to light? What has happened this process? Why did I have so many manual interactions here? What has happened in my, in my process. So, doing cross analytics, achieving transparency, and doing our report? And this has been the focus in the past.

Now, what we are looking into, and what our focus is now, is rather forward looking in the sense of, what shall happen?

Looking into, how can we enable execution management to be smarter, faster, more efficient?

How can we do intelligent prediction of what is going to happen? Which delivery is going to be too late? And how can we prevent this to be a thing today? How can we drive intelligent automation?

And, how can we drive value for an organization, which is a key question, in any business?

Um, and to, to set the stage here a bit on, on the actual trends, some actual trends in this, which we have seen, is the first research here on the Business Execution.

Benchmarking, which has been conducted in the Fall, 2020, was more than 2000 respondents. focusing on processes like Accounts payable, Accounts receivable, procurement, auto management, going through a VP director levels of companies, beyond one million dollars of revenue. And there were quite some striking, striking findings. Which cannot. The elect, for example, on a touch list invoice rate. So, how is an invoice process in your company, you know, as a touch list? Or is it lots of manual interaction?

The finding was that an average company average companies have 27% touch list invoice processing, while the best in class, the top performance, they have 85 touch this process. You can imagine what a difference it makes if there is a company which has to touch every R three out of four purchase orders or invoices. Whereas is a company which only has to touch 8 or 1 or 2 invoices, authorization. So, this has a huge impact on process efficiency, and on, on operational efficiency and cost and competitiveness.

Similar, if you look into paid on time, right, you know how much of all the company average paying of suppliers, we can see the average company is only paying half suppliers on time, while a top performer is paying 77% on tight. So, again, here, a big difference in the right timing, the right uses of discounts on the right usage of working capital, which is about executing business processes in the smart manner, and last example, is the cost for invoice. So how much does a company spend on average on processing a single invoice?

Where the result of this benchmark was that your average companies, they spend $17 versus top performers spending less than $7. And if you imagine that, large organizations easily have more than a million invoices per year, they process, you easily have a double digit million saving, resulting from more efficient invoice process. So it's all about organizational efficiency, and enabling companies to drive this performance in a smarter way.

In other research, recent research here to set the stage is about, and what are these essential points for execution excellence? And this was an inquiry, which we did. Exelon is where we found a couple of interesting, key bullets here. Like, for example, first number one, is to have the executive buy in and a strong value focused, And this is on my own experience.

A key success factor to have a sponsor or at Siemens, I was looking for the head of shared services, the head of procurement sales. You also always wanted to cash case, which I mentioned, we have to see if all as executive sponsor. And having a strong focus on the value in. tracking this value, even incentivizing his organization towards clear targets.

And thus driving the the organization. Then, and that's obviously also engaging the business users.

Third factor is Jeff Dedicated Resources, particularly by a Center of Excellence.

And I'll come up to this, and provide the right training. Very important point is to tie the initiative to strategic need to strategic targets and the performance goals of the organization.

Near real-time data refresh, so to have reliable, real-time data.

Also, use smart technologies, like predictive, prescriptive capabilities where you can predict which payment is going to be you prescribe, Which delivery is to be executed, and, thus, help the organization based on the process, my insights, which you've gained. And have strong, capable champions.

So, these are a couple of learnings, which we had through research and experiences, and based on that, one of the key approaches, which which we defined, is that we, we failed beyond process mining. You need to look at the bigger picture. The bigger picture we define as a master plan. So, looking at a master plan where for your organization all the relevant leavers are in sync, you know, so that you really have a holistic understanding saying How do I leverage this power of data Was postmodern execution management to drive impact on the organization? And, the levers or the streams, as we call them here, which we have identified, is first, an utmost is value stream.

Focusing on value as a higher purpose.

What is the value, which you want to achieve? And then, we have a methodology to frame the value, Realize the value sustainability. And you can see on the timeline at this, the approach to, say, starting was framing a value, and defining a target, realizing the value, and then sustainability.

Second, Stream is the management stream, which is very, very important here, to have an executive sponsor, who gives Clear Targets incentivized organization, and then remains in the topic on a quarterly basis by having quarterly engagements, quarterly business reviews and keep an eye on the progress.

Then the operational street.

Looking to the operating model, the roles responsibility, defining this, operating model, establishing SUV, scaling, SUV, bringing school swim the process tree.

Looking into which processes you want to focus on, where's the biggest value for you?

And then the technical data stream, which is all about the system connection, exists inside connecting the system, providing approvals. And having that part, and again, this, from my experience, is very important. Not only to look at single stream stats in too many organizations, looking purely into auto or assistant connection. But this is not, a purpose of its own purpose is really the bigger picture.

And driving value for the organization is supported by executive management.

So let's dive a bit into how, in my experience, these streams are, can be, can be the keynote and what, Why and how it needs to be done here.

So in the value stream starting with that, there is a standard value friending approach, which we suggest, defining your target, saying, What is my obvious or sales? Outstanding? What is my menu or, no touch invoice rate. What is my on time delivery rates or whatever KPIs relevant here? Then identify the key value drivers to incentivize for the right targets.

And track the value Y, I think we spoke about that part, saying, really have a executive engagement here was clear value for the organization, drive organizational alignment of accountability, ability and sustainable impact. And then, how to do it, was a frame methodology.

And via clear targets, which are set, and have a regular tracking on the, on the progress.

Now, the value approach here, which we recommend, consists of three consecutive steps. First of all, framing the value, like, for example, identify an opportunity.

And we had, initially, we had the catalyst invoice rate as an example. So saying, OK, on Tesla's inverse, right? I believe my organization can do better.

Then, let's qualifies opportunity by looking into these systems, looking into the event logs, looking into the invoices with the process manually, or automated, whether they there's, What's, What's your actual touch rate per or invoice?

Then analyze the root causes. Why is the organism? Why does organization have such a high manual activity and involvement with invoice processing?

The business case on that, saying, OK, from that kind of manual activities, can automate a certain part, which calculates on a certain business case, and then you can prior drives that, That opportunity with the other opportunity, which you want to go forth.

So this is a framing part saying this is the potential, which you can leverage for the organization, then comes the realization part in the sense of determine what needs to be done. How do I improve my my touch with invoice, right? How do I apply RPA process redesign, training, batch processing, whatever you want to use their to improve the task is inverse, right?

And then they ensure the execution for the serialized part, You know, And then, obviously, you want to sustain this part that the in the organization, there's, again, somebody coming and saying, oh, I need to manually touch every invoice. But you want to sustain the no touch rate which you have achieved here.

And report is to your management, including the no touch, right, but also including the value which has been realized.

And this is typically a very operational, hands-on approach, which we recommend to pursue and to combine the value we see with the, with the organization value methodologies, as some kind of best practice samples here, which we apply it on a building permit, first of all. So seeing on the company level with our corporate objectives, business strategies, business initiatives, and then align the targets and the, the, the focus, which you choose here, was this value pair pyramid, very pyramid. Then, also, in the valley tree, we bring in lots of best practices, which I'm going to share a little bit more in depth here, but, in essence, which is still learning from thousands of deployments, will be no in purchase to pay those delivery drivers, which have a quick turnaround time and can bring value to organizations.

And then, obviously, looking to benefit analysis as that, as an individual best practice assessment, and seeing what can be achieved.

There's also various tree. Next stream is the management stream, Second screen there, which is about really the management involvement. So, identifying the executive sponsor, and that can only really stress this point as recommendation if you want to do.

Process mining was impact on your organization, Start was finding an executive sponsor, like somebody, as a business process owner, or ideally, you're out of procurement of sales.

Shared services who get excited about the power of this process mining X-ray technology, and then wants to drive execution improvement there.

So get an exact response and engage, Align with his or her strategic targets.

Then also get a regular guidance from the sponsor.

Ideally, you have an incentive ization.

We're, in our case with the audits of cash. We had all the catfish incentivize, which obviously brings again different attention to an organization.

And then thus you can rock your organization.

Why I think it's pretty much about prioritization, tap into too many cases, where I went to my organization, said, hey, this is the complexity of your process, this process explorer. But they just said, Well, I have something of priorities to do, you know. So you have to get on top of the, of the attention list there. And And this is easiest if you have a strong executive sponsor, makes this a priority for our organization. There is a clear accountability.

And thus has Dimension Enlightenment, How, in my experience, but it's important here, is to have regular vehicles co-ordinate business revenues. Progress reviews, also do some benchmarking in your organization, or cross organization, to see where you stand, What you can learn from the best practices.

And do some, some hot listing where, again, there's little powering, comparing units against each other, and having them being learn and share their experiences.

Operational stream, so the third stream in this master plan is all about the operating model, and the roles and responsibilities.

And here, what we're looking at is defining a clear operating model, which is customized to the specific organization. Design the right roles and responsibilities.

Build a ramp up. Plan and budget for the Center of Excellence Teller, Center of Excellence and Scale, The Center of Excellence. And for me, satisfaction, at, close to my heart, since I've built one myself at Siemens was 40 people domain. Name it in a different form, like, transformation engine, or execution of a program. That's the key point here is, in this Operation Stream, to have a dedicated workforce which is incentivized and passionate about driving change across the global organization.

Why? Since I think it requires a central accelerate them. Clear responsibility. And you should focus on clear value focused on checking, and the easiest way, how to achieve this is ... organization.

Defining right and the suitable governance, and a, the right operating model.

So, let's look at the Center of Excellence here.

Which, from my experience, has three key roles and responsibility. First of all, as a catalyst, as a catalyst to align with the executive sponsor, engaged executive sponsor, and operationalize strategic targets, and enable a data driven organization.

Second role is as an evangelist to spread the constant usage of execution management, to make the organization stand.

The power of process mining as, a, as an X-ray for any business process, co-ordinate across business units and functions, and then also establish a community, share best practices, and have to people who have done it before.

Talk and share innovations with misconduct, cars, and peers.

Last but not least, it's an enabler.

So, the Center of Excellence in charge of the technical implementation, mentioning access, data protection, performance, onboarding, training, all of these parts, and this is typically what I recommend as the roles and responsibility for us and of excellence. I mean, what a scene in.

In my past here it is on the operating models.

That there are some of excellence which have different value propositions and different Let us so.

And some organizations have chosen to take a Center of Excellence which provides a platform as a service basically, which keeps his software running and then enables the organization to have own data analytics or own own research on that platform which is provided. You know, most organization, which has seen is where the C E provides process, mining as a service.

So, it provides standard dashboards on financial accounts payables and receivables which are standardized across the organization in which the large organizations can have some hundreds of users in procurement, logistics, sales, finance.

And then also, there are certain kinds of accidents which look rather into driving process transformation across an organization. So this is then the process, the focus on execution management service.

And from my point of view, what is important if you plan to have a center of excellence, is to give it some thoughts about what is the value proposition, and then how do you stuff Your center of excellence in the right home, and also where in your organization is the best fit. And here, you have a multitude of different types of organs. of series. Many of them are in a central IT departments like Siemens, exon, BMW, GSK.

But also we see more and more Center of excellence coming up in shared services like in telecom Rolodex Ingram.

And then there's a couple of samples for, for holding Structures, Chief Digital Officers, which is coming up more and more.

So that's something which I'm seeing that this role of Chief Digital Officer or Chief Data Officer is been stuffed in more and more organizations, and the challenge of this organization typically send to how to make it happen.

And the process mining execution management can be a great lever since it supports a data driven organization that provides fact based insights, and, thus, can help these CDOs to be very focused and efficient.

Then also, there's no examples of our in house, and consulting and business lead series.

So there's no one size fits all, and it really needs to be adopted to the appropriate organization here.

With that, let's come to the process stream, which is the fourth stream in this master plan, looking into focus processes.

Looking into actually a process roadmaps since, I mean, process money can be applied to any business process, but you don't want to address the big white elephant in one piece, but one slice of the process, by process, make it easier, digestible.

And you need to look into the onboarding for the business process owners, define appropriate KPIs per process, and have the right use cases focused, and it's all about ..., have the roadmap planning, and have this aligned with the business process owners.

So, how we typically approach this is, first of all, with A industry, we are looking into all the potential processes, which can be screened with process mining.

It basically, here, is, this, is a selection of typical processes, which we discussed from customer facing processes to finance administration, product and services, supply and distribution, and then, typically, the, the first processes to look into with process mining, is purchase to pay.

Order to cash, accounts payable, Accounts receivable, For the simple reason, that these are processes, which have typically easy, accessible event logs in the backend source systems.

And then these are processes which have a high intention of automation standardization.

So, screening these processes brings a lot of value to, to organizations.

And that's why typically, we advised to have those core processes as the core processes to get started with.

How to get started is, then, in the next step, with a so-called value tree here, where you can see in this slide, the example of the purchase to pay process.

Which on the happy path goes from Perches request to payment?

And, we, we can screen such a process with your business objectives, saying, OK, let's check the actual process based. Oregon spend reduction, working capital optimization, labor productivity, supply, reliability, compliance, and sustainability. So, there's different lenses, which you can use to look at such a process. And then there are different improvement opportunities, which, which typically refocusing, like for example, looking into duplicate payments. And this is always amazing. If you look into transactional systems, how many duplicate payments are there, which is a very low hanging fruit to save lots of money.

and looking into early invoices.

You just want to pay on time here, and not respond to early noises change. And we were deliberate performance. So there's these are the typical ways which we look at ... where we looked into the rework Y, which is always had to be reworked. There was a change in price times quantity manual action whenever. And this is what you look at.

And then based on that, you can identify improvement potentials and execute most improvements subsequently.

So, with that, let's come to the last stream here, which is the technical data streams.

So, the foundation, so, to say, where we look into the right source systems, looking into it today, I wanted to see my purchase to pay, which is my source system, Where do I get my event logs, which table?

Show the right data connections to get the access, get the data right, and make sure that only the right the people who authorized to see this other, get the right authorizations and then drive the opera operationalization of the data replication and to build, to build reports on that.

How you do that is with this kind of connectors, which basically are available today.

For any type of source system, the S&P, Salesforce, Oracle, Cooper, whatever you have it, there are lots of sending connectors to connect to, either on prem or the Cloud and then get the data a screen.

Now, what are a couple of technical innovation, which we see here on, on different levels.

On the one side: starting on the on the lower, the third part here, where I spoke about standard connectors.

And this is something amazing, which I've seen the last couple of years, where, when we initially started to connect the process mining screening to the source system, This was lots of customers and a lot of effort, and this was a major effort driver.

Today, there are those standard connectors who are kind of plug and play to connect to your source system. And all these, there's certain standardization on technical side, this needs to be considered, but it's much, much easier.

Then, on the real-time data ingestion, having the power of replicating the transactional data in real-time, and thus also identifying certain things like there will be a lead response or in a call center, interacting with people on real time, having re-usable connectors for quick plug and play. And then also, on the cloud phase, F the possibility to connect here, across multiple systems and cross company, something, which we see upcoming much more, is this cross company benchmark, or also to have a better transparency with your suppliers.

Now, on the data processing side, the middle layer here are some key innovations, which we, which we've seen, is the Cloud based data processing, which is clearly a trend.

So here, everything is moving to the cloud.

And this is what we are seeing for our installed base, as well as for new companies, new customers, which brings also lot of performance improvement, which allows multi event logs and the cloud to be able to have cross process analysis, where you can see for logistics and procurement. Why how these, how these interfere, and doing, doing benchmarking?

And then on the front end side, with, on the user side, where you have the leaders, and the analysts and the stuff people, we see some very innovative developments, which kind of execution apps. So, standard apps for accounts payable to Congress symbols, which are very easy to use. And the matter of fact, I've been always surprised why, in large organizations, you have thousands of people who shared service organizations who do accounts payable or accounts receivables, which would be like a standard process. Which is done in a time of execution happened only exception based interaction with people there. Then proactive alerting, with a technology which informs that people saying business of payment, which is due today, you want to execute here, just click this button. Or this is a delivery which is getting, do you want to execute or express expedite the shipment here?

So this is all about proactive allergic in supporting the users based on the ..., what you have, and enabled people, then, execute things in an easier, smarter manner.

The same way, with AI and machine learning for predictive and prescriptive. Where we train algorithms to understand how people execute certain processes, and then suggest to the people to do it on their behalf, or where we train the artificial intelligence to prescribe what's going to happen. And then also, takeover action. Subsequently.

Last but not least, I topic very close to my heart, Here is the sustainability, where we're looking into ... transparency to support carbon emission.

And if you just imagine the, the, the current way kind of way how companies are looking into carbon emission of carbon footprint is very much top-down, you know. Without really understanding or influencing single process decisions.

But it's rather a top-down calculation assessment, where we believe that, with our approach, we can enhance this with the operation of transparency, where we provide to the people and information about their carbon, emission, or carbon impact.

If they do, for example, a single purchase order, you know, if somebody buys a crude in Asia, versus's crew, which is bought near their office, there might be a price impact, but it's also the carbon footprint, which which plays a role.

This is what we provide additional information to the user, so that they can be more carbon conscious on the daily decisions and thus, have a bottom up carbon emission Consideration, which I believe believe is that it's a crucial part for each of us, too.

Some look into this important topic of sustainability.

So with that, I'm coming to my last slide here.

And looking into the shift, which I addressed from clouds to or from on prem to Cloud, where, in the past, we've seen lots of great capabilities on prem, With pros mining, enabling, process performance monitoring, process fluidics, and data visualization.

But with the technology trend now towards the Cloud, there's much more in there, like proactive process performance management, supportive, and nurturing, and also achieving cross company transparency, where you can look into your supplier release Brazilians by having a prose transparency with your suppliers and their suppliers understanding better, how the process going.

I'm looking into intelligent process execution within an execution app's notifications and intelligence support.

And last but not least, we'll see Software as a service, which allows to reduce total cost of ownership, since you don't have to maintain your own on prem installation, and operation and maintenance.

And we're, in the cloud, we see the potential of operations and innovation since you have a center provider, which operates the top innovations on your behalf.

So, all in all, to summarize, my part here is that, I believe that it's important to look beyond process mining. And mining is a fantastic foundation to understand what's actually happening.

Burdge, there's much more on top of that. We're looking at the bigger picture, looking at the value purpose, where we're an organization. We are seeing cases with a three digit millions of saving potential as a bigger picture, and really focus, then having the right management engagement, and saying, all right, this is not only about money, but this is about organizational transformation, And we have a huge value target. And I asked the Mexican sponsor our passionate to get this going, then get the operational stream properly set up, was right operating model instead of excellence. It's the process streams in sync, step by step.

And last but not least, and leverage the technical innovation was execution apps and artificial intelligence. Having the right data available to have your systems connected, to make it all happen.

And have a, have a sustainable impact on your organization.

And with that, I would like to conclude my presentation here.

Thank you for your attention and looking forward to your questions.

Lara is what a terrific presentation you cover. So many aspects that obviously or important to our audience from the big picture, just some of the technological implementations. Very, very comprehensive. Thank you for sharing all those insights and lots of questions here. Lots of Thank you, great presentation. So, I'll just start with Anna Martinez He or she's super excited about process mining.

And she says hey, awesome awesome presentation and her question has to do about getting that buy in from senior leaders your organization, and you talked about it already, but I would like you to refocus and help and a little bit here. Her question is did you have to present actual company data to executives? To get the process. The solution with process mining approved, how did you get executives in the company to understand how process mining works, and the value creates? So, she's looking for some advice on making that connection to senior leaders. What do you find it to be most compelling to them as you present process mining for them, That may sound like a foreign language.

Right. Yeah. Great question: I think this is a key challenge. Which everybody, experiences. We're starting with .... I did it myself. when I started with ..., 2014 to 20 15 initially. It was all excited about the transparency by business processes using these X-rays and I made prospects progress. I went to people from procurement sales, showing them the complexity of their processes. And everybody said, Wow, this is amazing. But nothing happened.

I thought, Hey, what am I doing wrong? What am I missing here?

And then alert, it's like, a, you know, it's like, my analogy is always say, it's like, if you do an X-ray of a person where you show the person this is your, your body, your x-ray? You gotta shake here, you should go through A therapy to cure your cancer, by stopping smoking and drinking. But, the person says, come on, leave me alone. I got other things to do.

You know, so, the messages you have to look into for the people who are willing to change, you have to connect to their priorities.

Understand, OK, this person that wants to drive automation, process efficiency. How can I supported in the terms and the language of that person? For example, by procurement, not talking about the process, complexity, but talking about a more accurate payments, or a less touch rate, or, you know, get, get their pain points, addressed properly, and show them the benefits of value they can realize? And then, that's, well, so for me, it's always important to have this value friendly.

First saying, if you go to your head of procurement, saying, I believe I can say for $10 million, you will have the attention, Know. And then, you have obviously, to substance related, by saying, I've seen in this little snapshot, duplicate payments account for that part. Early payments, third party, payment terms, deviation, that part. And then you get the attention. Once you have the intention, you get the buy, and then you have to make it operationalized by saying, OK, in order to make to get this 10 million for you now, I need your support by being the sponsor. And I need 2 or 3 people to have my-s.q.l. setup and then get going. And this typically, it's a mechanism which in my experience works best.

What great suggestions, what great advice there And they're that they're finding the trigger points for and and be empathetic to the leaders and find out what's what's important to them and latching on to that to those priorities is so critical. And these two on the subject, several people talk about different types of governance, and you discuss a bit about governance in your presentation, And we all know that it's important to have that governance, but it's specifically, if I look at one of the roles, that governance is the role of a process owners. So you talk a lot about a champion here.

But they also need to have that process owner engaged in your organization.

And honestly, often in the organization is, one of the issues that you have is, that, it's not clear who the process owner is, and, and, and then sometimes you may identify someone and they like, well, I don't want to be the owner for that process. You know, it's gotta be Joe over there and not me.

So talk a little bit about this journey off really nailing down process ownership and an organization, which often is a fundamental issue that makes these implementations hard.

Absolutely, and it's really about, you know, in the beginning, finding the right process owners who have the right mindset, the right understanding the right passion, and have the topic of data and process transformation on top of their agenda. And I had the same experience. I went to many, many, process owners, who my thought there might be the right people to, to address, you know? But it's coming back to my image about the X-ray. You know, you have many people who say, well, it's nice. And you show me something about my life here. I should stop smoking, but I keep having fun, you know, like, sheep drinking smoking, and I'd say experienced people saying, well, I've been doing my purchase process for 10 years in this way. And I don't want you to look into my pitfalls on my weakness. It's, you know. It's just the way it is. And then, OK, this person, these people, move on. And look to find somebody who's got the right mindset, saying, hey, well, this is a great chance for me to really holistically understand my process.

And drive improvement and value for the organization has these first champions. You know, might be a process owner who might be a head of business.

You might be a CFO who might be achieved of digital transformation, but try to find the right people with whom you can interconnect with, whom you can have to first pilots was hit with whom you can have the first success stories.

And once you have these first goals are these first successes you will see that the message spreads spread across the organization. And you'll have more and more people coming in. And those people who are resistant to beginning at a certain point of time, you know, they're squeezed by the organization, said, hey, what's about you? You should be making our procurement process much more efficient. Please come on. Adopt this approach as well. And this is typically how you get into an organization.

Find the right people in charge of governance. Get them engaged, and then scale in your organization.

Lot of great insights, Lara's, thank you for sharing that, that very practical insights, and very, very, very, useful insights. We're going to shift a little bit from governance strategy to technology a bit here. A couple of questions related to technology. one comes from Carol, Carol Knowles, and Carol was asking about in the context of corporations now considering opportunities to implement blockchain, specifically.

Is there any sort of overlap or synergies that happened as a result of use of process mining and some organizations looking at the implementation of blockchain are endangered actions there that you see whatsoever or there are mutually exclusive issues?

Well, to be honest, a very interesting question. I'm just trying to think about, in those seven years, which I've done, process mining, I haven't come across that part.

Blockchain for me, is, this is a great technology, obviously, to, to document certain things, and to have a process documentation on that side. Well, but I know I haven't come across any use case, where those two things are getting together. But would be interested to see whether there's anybody else, who's got an idea there.

I agree. I agree. I think that the that, that there are emerging technologies that I have not myself seeing the overlap at this point.

But, you know, as technologies evolve, maybe someone is doing that, that type of work.

Now, our next question comes from Britain Nelson. He talks about the technical connections to transactional systems. There are not cloud based. You talked about, you know, connections to cloud based systems during your presentation's comment is that financial services.

They have origination systems that tend to be older, legacy systems or services systems regarding customer service or collections that may not be cloud based. How do the connections take place in settings like that when you're trying to connect your legacy systems?

Yeah, I'm sorry if I made myself clear on that side. The, the source systems, which we're looking at today are mostly on prem. They just, and they are moving step by step towards the cloud, but, currently, the current situation is probably like, I would say, 70, 80% of what I know is installed base is on prem.

But we connect those source systems and legacy systems towards our cloud solution, our EMS Cloud, and this is where the cloud comes into the game.

And so, in this respect, it's about having the connectors installed on the on prem system, on the financial system or on the manufacturing system, on the supply chain system, whatever you want to look into and replicate the relevant event logs from the right table to invite fields into the cloud where the data processing then takes place.

Farewell. one final quick question here that I gather from the audience is that process mining is an evolving technology and methodology to a certain extent.

What are you excited about, especially as it continues to evolve and adapt new applications and use cases emerge? Or maybe the technology itself is getting to our next level, What are you excited about in the near term future for process mining?

What I'm very excited about is this making process mining, learn, become a virtual companion for people. You know, a process model You can understand what has happened and how the processes and activities going there. And building on that. Building a virtual assistant, Which can then suggest to a user, Hey, you should do this in a different form or can I? Remove this payment block for you next time? Or This is an activity, which you should be looking at, you know, and supporting the organization to become smarter become a digital enables organization. Which I described in the chapter of my book by the way. So that's what excites me, you know, using all these smart technologies, the power of data, real-time data, to to build on process mining, go beyond process mining, and help organizations to execute their processes in a smarter and more efficient way.

I think that that is a great journey, which we, which we all have ahead of us, that's wonderful intelligence, process mining in the horizon, and the Lars cannot say how grateful. We are for you to take the time to come from Munich Germany, to the world and share your expertise, your vest, insights, and practical suggestions to our global audience today.

Thank you very much for having me. Thank you.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, Lara's ranking higher directly from Munich, Germany, A leader with Salon is, who is implementing process mining at scale to create value for organizations, their customers, and society by implementing the new technologies. Terrific presentation. Wonderful participation from the audience. I had lots, and lots of questions, from all over the place, governance, questions, specific technology, related questions, from the strategic to, the very tactical. And that really shows the richness of our audience and the, all the leaders who are joining us today and for the next three days.

So we're gonna be taking a break now, and then we're gonna come back with Abby with a presentation from Abby That's going to focus on from process mining chu process intelligence. That we started discussing with Lars, we're gonna keep that up and then how to get more from your process data. And that's gonna come in with a presentation from Richard Robin. And he's gonna be with us at the top of the hour just show you how great enduring organizations are doing just that right now across multiple industries. So take a break now, log back on at the top of the hour, where we join Abby and their presentation. Thank you.

About the Author

Dr. Lars Reinkemeyer,
VP Customer Transformation,
Celonis SE.

As Vice President Customer Transformation at Celonis, Dr. Reinkemeyer is advising companies on their process transformation journey. He brings more than 20 years of industry experience, e.g. supporting Siemens’ Digital Transformation. Since 2008 he pursued Big-Data-Analytics to drive digital transformation and applied Process Mining since 2014.

In close collaboration with functional departments like procurement, sales, finance, logistics he leveraged Process Mining insights and built a user community in excess of 6.000 active users. In addition to IT, he commands international leadership experience in Strategy, Sales, Distribution, Compliance and is a regular speaker at international conferences and visiting scholar at Stanford GSB and UCSB.