Session Information:

Process Mining Silver Bullet

This session will show you how seeing your processes clearly, using process intelligence, will help you understand what is actually happening within your organization vs. what is supposed to happen.

Key takeaways:

Session Transcript:

I have a video presentation from two industry leaders on the topic of process mining and what they're going to share it with you, And what I want you to take away from this, from this experience and this presentation, includes how you see your processes more clearly using process intelligence, and that help you understand what's actually happened within your organization versus what is supposed to happen.

In that, the key takeaways from this video will include how to align your technical process analysis techniques with the business view.

How you're going to gain confidence in your group's ability to meet their goals, how to develop a clear line of sight, and your organization's ability to deliver value, how to build consistency and stability for the business functions in your organization. And finally, how do you create a path to grow with operational insights and continuous improvement?

So the two presenters are Sandy Chasm Lee, who is an independent analyst and systems architect, specializing in digital process automation, business process management, social enterprises, enterprise architecture, and business intelligence.

Sands's career spans running product companies and service firms and working for very large organizations where she implemented what she's talking about in this in this session.

She is also a globally features speaker on the topic of BPM and its impact on Business.

She's going to be joined by Peter ..., who is a senior executive in the industry. He has spent much of his career, focusing on helping his clients understand how to get the most information from their data, and how to make improvements in their business transformation journey based on that information.

Now, of course, because of the way that the session is being delivered, Sandy and and Peter will not be able to answer questions live here after after, after we play their presentation, but they will, they should be available to answer some of your questions. And our community can certainly answer several of your questions on the link for the conference, that is on LinkedIn, that I'll provide during the interest via the chat during this presentation.

So, without further ado, let me bring their presentation to you, And, again, this is called the process mining, silver bullet.

I split my time between being an independent industry analyst, covering process technologies, and working with companies on their technology strategy and architecture. So this gives me a pretty good understanding of the business challenges and technology solutions around that. And I also write about process related topics on my blog at column two dot com that you can see on the right-hand side here.

Today, I'm going to start with the business challenges being caused by the current pandemic crisis and look at how process intelligence can be used to address them. And then Pete's gonna follow this with some more information on ..., process intelligence offerings and a quick demo, assuming that I need him enough time.

So let's start with the disruption that we're seeing today that the disruption in businesses today, which is due to the pandemic, is really a disruption of business processes.

Goods and services just aren't flowing the way that they used to. And your internal company processes probably aren't working the way they're supposed to wider. Now, it's such a shift that although you can see that you're in trouble, you might be focusing on the wrong things. And you might not know how to get past this disruption in this point of danger and into smoother waters. So that's what process intelligence is going to help you.

You might have had a drop in the amount of business that you have, You could be scrambling to realign your operations or your business could be booming, Which sounds like a great thing, but can be a real challenge if you're unable to keep up with the demand.

Your employees are probably working from home or in your own facilities but with physical distancing protocols. And that creates some, some challenges. And there's huge disruptions in supply chains of physical products, right, from manufacturing through shipping and delivering, again, due to social distancing and plant closures. So those are some, some serious things going on.

Now, depending on your business, you could also find yourself selling to a different customer base. You have some goods and services that are now being consumed more by home based workers than by corporate offices.

So, remember the great toilet paper shortage of March 2020, although part of that was just panic on the on side of consumers. Some of it was due to the need to shift manufacturing and packaging and distribution from a focus on business to consumer. So there was some reality in the supply chains around that as well as some sort of panic buying that went on.
5:05
Now, let's look at an order to cache disruption.

So, this can be disrupted in a lot of ways in the, in the different, in the different scenarios. So let's say you, you sell a product and you're in a maybe a possibly a niche market, but it's become the hot new item during a pandemic.

So, maybe this is some kind of network equipment for remote access, or breadmakers, or gardening tools, or anything that you might be selling to a business, or a consumer, that's now all of a sudden impossible to get, so everybody wants to buy it.

You're really happy.

You've got online ordering on your website, but after a couple of days of massive sales, there's a problem, because you can't process the orders as fast as they arrive.

So although your online ordering system is charging your customers right away, their products aren't getting shipped out until a week later.

And then something happens in, along your supply chain. So you can't even manufacture your products, much less ship them out.

So now, our customers are really unhappy, and you end up with a lot of charge backs for your on ship products and bad reviews online. So this is really not a good place to be.

Now to figure out how to solve this disruption, in your order to cache problem, you need to look at your entire end to end process and work out where the problems are coming from.

So you start with questions like these wired shipments delayed.

What's causing the customer dissatisfaction? You might find that customers are OK with a delayed shipment, but don't like being charged for something until it's been shipped. And you need to change your online ordering, so that payment will be triggered by your fulfillment process, instead of by the initial order.

You might find you're not getting supplies that you need for manufacturing because of delays from a particular supplier, and you need to change suppliers.

So the bottom line is that if you don't understand your processes and what's causing the problems, you're never going to be able to fix problems. And that's what we wanna look at.

Now, I want to start out with a brief just expansion on some of the key challenges that we're, that we're seeing caused by the pandemic.

And I'l.l go through these fairly quickly, but the first is around all of the economic and financial impacts with a fluctuating economy.

Stock markets are all over the place, and obviously, there's some clear winners and losers in different market segments. As we see and things like travel and hospitality, for example, and losing Amazon and zoom are really booming.

Now, a lot of consumers and companies are just saying, locked down, preserve cash, go into crisis management mode. Because they don't have any planning, it really matches this level of disruption.

Then this financial and rest is making, as I said, some companies really conscious about purchasing. But we also have these super cheap interest rates right now, and so some companies are wanting to spend money because the money is very cheap to get right now.

Now, on top of that, I mentioned supply chain problems. Globalization now means that our supply chains can stretch across the country and across borders, and those distances are becoming a logistical problem in the in the pandemic.

So, we have disrupted supply chains that causing problems for all types of companies as well, as well as consumers, So a lot of issues here with how those supply chain processes work.

The second thing is around the workforce, and we're seeing a massive change in how work gets done within companies and what kind of technology.

We need to handle this, and you're already in the middle of figuring out how to handle a distributed workforce.

And depending on where you are, or you might be handling how to move that workforce back into the office part of the time, and you might not have chickens on your zoom calls the way that I sometimes have on line, but this collision of home and work-life.

It means that people are dealing with family and pets and home deliveries and everything else while they're working.

one of tool that I really see is valuable in supporting remote workers is intelligent automation. So, the idea that you can send people the right work at the right time with them, collaborate with their colleagues, and still have security and compliance in those, in those business processes. And that's what some of these processes, technologies can can bring us as well.

Now, this also changes the way that work is managed, with people working in a distributed manner. These old style offices where you had a manager walking around, making sure everybody looks busy, that's just not a good ****, obviously, with remote work.

So you want to make sure that your employees are being rewarded on results, and then you don't need to be watching them every minute, so you need to have the right metrics in there.

So at the end of the day, the old way of working in our office is probably go on forever. No, this does not, mean we won't go back to working in offices together.

There's still some things that just work better, when you're done in person. But companies are realizing that allowing employees to work from home at their discretion, maybe once in awhile, or maybe completely, can be a good thing all around.

Now the third major business challenge is dealing with contactless customer interactions, and we have Domino's, autonomous pizza delivery of it. here, and there's probably some innovative ways, that you can have the necessary interactions with your customers.

You could have the same people, that are dealing with customers, now, face to face, but doing it using some sort of online collaboration platform.

You can get more self-service in place where you could have chatbots, answering some questions, and then escalate to an agent when you need to.

And there's also potential to have remote devices do some of the work. There was a really interesting case study. I saw with all state insurance. This was a number of months ago where they were using drones to check roof damage after hurricane, so that an adjuster didn't have to drive out your house and climb up on your roof and spend half a day looking around. So this, let them settle claims faster, obviously, and now it has the additional advantage of providing a contact list interaction for doing that kind of inspection.

Now, the key to moving customers to these online interactions is you have to have a modern customer experience that's easy to use, and it's also has to be fully functional.

So, you want to have things like a customer being able to do a complete order and support functions online, and not have to call in to do part of their, of their transaction. You could have other things that you do with customers as well. You got virtual conferences. I've been going to a lot of virtual conferences lately, mostly with software vendors, but with other companies as well. And there's some really interesting ideas around how these virtual conferences and online training are changing with the idea that most people are working from home now.

So, none of this is going to happen, of course, without a modern technology infrastructure. And this is forcing a lot of companies to really modernize or perish at this point. So, if you're going to support remote workers, have a great online customer experience but your customers process there, self-service transactions automatically, you might have some work to do because you might not be there yet.

So a major issue that we have is that this legacy infrastructure is really fragile. When it has unexpected loads.

It might not have flexible enough processes to allow for different work patterns, So that if you have to change the way that work gets done, because some people are remote, your legacy systems may not support that.

And with having a distributed workforce, you need to set up some secure, remote access methods. And this puts a strain on your network infrastructure to and, potentially, on the back end systems, depending on how they're being, on how they're being accessed. So there can be some issues here with this legacy infrastructure just being fragile.

So what I'm seeing with a lot of companies, then, is they're saying, like, Oh, this is a time we need to move on to Cloud Platform. So they're all rushing to get their core processes on cloud platforms.

So this is certainly going to make them more scalable and more available to a distributed workforce. But this has its own risks. Do any kind of accelerated IT project, you know, is going to have risks.

And if you're just pushing it through, without understanding what those fundamental problems are in your business processes, why your processes are broken, then you're just going to be doing the same thing faster in a more distributed manner, not necessarily fix the problems that you have.

So we have an opportunity now to look at technology modernization and business re-organization. That's not just about surviving through this disruption. But actually increasing your competitiveness so that as we exit the crisis, you're in a better situation.

Then, the core of these changes that I really see, being around, creating agile, intelligent processes that can be scaled and distributed.

So, you want to create a new business model or a new product.

Agile processes and automation are gonna help you with that.

You need to support a remote workforce. Whether it's an, you know, your core workers just going and working from home, or something in another country.

A distributed cloud based platform is gonna let you do that.

And you need to scale your business up or down. Well, automation and cloud scalable architecture are going to support these new ways of doing business. Being able to have these agile, intelligent processes, that can scale, and that can be done anywhere.

Now once you have these plans in place that are really going to make you more competitive, then you're in great shape to get back to business with the same old challenges you had before the pandemic. There's always going to be new competitors, new business models, new regulations, new customer expectations.

And what you're going to find is that a lot of businesses right now hit the pause button and you have the chance to, right now, keep moving forward while your competitors are standing still.

Now, no matter how quickly we pass through this crisis, it has changed the future of work in many businesses.

We see some industries like travel and hospitality, and even commercial real estate that are going to take a long time to recover.

We're going to see a lot of business failures during that time.

And in their place, they're going to be newer business models that are more suited to this new normal. So, things are gonna change. Things are going to be different, but there's going to be some disruption and innovation that happens here.

A lot of companies will keep the idea of a distributed workforce, because if it makes sense for them, it makes sense economically, it lets them draw from a broader talent pool. Let's cut down on the amount of office space they need.

It also makes some employees as some employees happier, not to have to spend hours commuting every week, or it lets them choose to move up to the country or live in a different part of the, of the country altogether. So there's a lot of flexibility there.

Then because of this distributed workforce, some products that were sold primarily into businesses are going to shift to the consumer at home office market. So lots of computer and networking equipment here, but also office furniture, videoconferencing, environments, and even home office insurance.

Oh, yeah. And, of course.

The CEO of Barclays Bank points out that a lot of industries are never going back to large offices, where everybody has to be in the same place same time.

That one decision changes everything for so many different industries, this is really the game changer, that this idea that companies are saying, distributed work. It's not like we're going to be distributed. Everybody worked from home all the time, but, we don't all need to be in the same place, at the same time, either.

That means having some technology, some understanding of processes, and so on, that has to come into place before we can do that.

So, how are we going to adapt our disrupted businesses or disrupted processes for this future state, where things maybe stay in a distributed manner, where businesses might be greater, or less than what we had before?

So, this is dependent to some degree on fixing these fragile and broken processes that we use to run our businesses, and all the related supply chains.

So, appropriately enough, there's a process for fixing processes. You can see a simplified version of that here. And I'm going to step through these five different stages of discovering, analyzing, simulating, improving, and monitoring processes in the next several slides.

Now, when we talk about process intelligence, which is the real focus of this webinar today, there are parts of it spread throughout this cycle, but it usually refers to some of the analysis and monitoring capabilities, such as process mining and predictive analytics.

OK, first, I'm just going to take a very quick look at the general landscape of intelligent process automation tools.

I don't want to spend a lot of time here and it says a lot of sort of word salad going on and I'll break these down a little bit more in the following slides. So, the first part of this is the modeling and analysis tools. This is a big part of what I'm gonna be talking about today.

Before you start automating your processes, you need to have some understanding of what you're already doing, and the ability to map out what you think you want to do, so it's about understanding and analyzing and planning.

Second group are monitoring tools. So this is to keep you aware of what's happening right now in your processes as they're executing. So, visualizations, and alerts, dashboards, and so on, and also predictions about what is going to happen next.

Then, we have all these automation technologies. This is every anything that might be involved in that process improvement step.

Now, using automation doesn't mean there's no longer going to be people in the process, but it means that there'll be doing more problem solving or interacting with customers, rather than routine tasks.

Now, this all looks very technical, but the goal here is to be able to start to align these process tools with the Business View.

So, let's start with process discovery.

First of all, process mining tools. Take history logs from systems like your ERP and your CRM systems, and then they figure out the end to end process models that are underlying those.

So, process mining can also identify all the different ways that the process is actually being done, because things are never done in the same way, every every time a particular instance of a process.

So a one particular transaction can take a different pathway, then another transaction, even though you think they should be doing the same thing, and this helps you to figure out the reasons for the variants and places where you might have problems in there.

This is really good at finding some of these broken processes that you have if somebody looks at their discovery process and they say, Oh, I didn't even know we did that.

And then you will see places where people have been able to bypass certain controls, like issuing a purchase order without the right level of approval. So all of these kind of loopholes and broken processes and so on are the things that you're going to be able to start to track down by doing process mining because it's showing you what you are actually doing, not what you think you might be doing.

Next, kind of the other side of that, is task mining. And this is technically a lot like process mining. But it uses data collected by tracking user actions on their computers. You often see this in conjunction with RPA, robotic process automation tools, because they will put an agent on a user's desktop to track what they're doing for a few weeks, and then figure out what are the things to automate? But that task mining, create the same kind of data that we see from process mining. It's just what the workers are doing when they're working with different systems. So, all that copying and pasting, clicking around between legacy applications and spreadsheets and aircraft.

So the task mining really helps you to find opportunities for automating tasks.

So if the user always copies and pastes three specific fields on one screen over into three fields on another screen, that's definitely not a good use of your skilled knowledge workers time, and you'd like to bring in a little automation help them out.

So the advantage, as I said, of processing task mining over manual modeling, is that it's data driven.

The processes that you discover are the actual processes in your operation. It's not somebody's interpretation, or somebody's subjective view, of what that process is.

And it also includes a lot of information, like your frequency and duration of each activity, and each pathway in the process, You know exactly how long, for example, things are waiting and every task. And how many times they might pass around through a certain loop, or a certain set of activities.

Now, I realize that process mining sounds a little bit like magic. So I'm going to do a quick one slide, backgrounder on how it works.

So if you already know this stuff, that's fine. But I just want to give a little bit of a background.

So we start out with all of these different systems that are going to be the sources for the process, my data.

And at the top, we have a business process management system that's orchestrating all these different tasks. So, if you're looking at the one on the, on the left there, that's just orchestrating all these, all these different tasks, including user tasks to enter customer data, that's going to link to our Legacy Customer Information System at the lower left.

Service Tasks is going to push order information to our ERP system at the lower right, and each of these systems has their own history log. that tracks events for audit purposes.

So we're going to exploit those history logs to figure out how the process works overall.

Now, unfortunately, I did the build wrong on this slide, because I just put it in like an hour ago, And the other parts that show the history logs are gonna come up underneath. What you're seeing.

On the right hand side is, the, is the consolidated process model that we're getting from this consolidated event log. So as we trace, one single case, a single transaction, as it goes from the Green BPM system at the top, down into the Red Legacy System, back up to the Green system, and then down into the blue ERP system.

What we'd like to get is this consolidated model that shows us what happens.

And if we take a look at, and unfortunately, this is going to be a little bit hidden behind the, the screens here, I don't want to fix, as we're going through here. We have a history log of that comes out of the systems that shows the case number, or the transaction number. You can just see it there kind of in the middle, And then the name of the activity that happens, the start and end times. And then, what the actual activity or the what the resources that does it. Whether it's a person who does it, or whether it's a system call out to something. So that's kind of typical, you can see that line at the bottom, that's kind of typical for what goes into a history law.

So, that might be from the BPM system.

Then what we do, and again, unfortunately, you can't see this, is I've put together all of the history logs from the three different systems, so that we get to this consolidated one.

And from that, there's now these sort of magical algorithms that derives the process model from these records, and they're not really magic. I know what the math is behind these algorithms. But thanks to some very smart researchers at Eindhoven University in the Netherlands, and a number of other places, we can then derive this process model that consists of all of the activities that are happening in all of the different systems. So now we know what our process actually looks like as we, as we pass through a individual transaction or as an aggregate for the transactions. Now, task mining is a somewhat newer concept, and it captures the user interaction data as they work across different applications. But the algorithms to derive the process models are are pretty much the same.

So that just gives you a little bit of a background on what process mining. It's just so that it doesn't seem too mysterious.

So let's get back to, oh, now it shows up.

So let's get back to our sort of cycle of discover, analyze, and so on, and move on to the next step.

So you've uncovered what your processes are. Using process mining, and task mining, and now you need to figure out where the problems are.

So the process mining tools are probably going to help you to a certain extent with that. Especially with this initial category that I have listed here, of process conformance problems.

So you want to figure out which processes have instances are particular cases that aren't compliant with your rules for some reason. So they're you're violating the rules, or they're following a path that they shouldn't be following.

So you might have something for how purchase orders get issued. And you might have certain cases where that path didn't get followed properly.

So the process mining tools can show you what the actual processes overlaid on the expected compliant process. And then you can see where the differences are, and how it happened, but something didn't happen in the right way.

Then you need to do some root cause analysis to help you figure out what's causing some of these problems.

And there's a number of different tools available for this, but you're looking for things like if you have a really long cycle time, you can usually trace it back to bottlenecks and resources.

So you don't have enough resources on one certain task, whether that's a human resource or some other kind of resource. You just don't have enough of them to process that task.

If you see that you have a process that loops through the same set setup activity several times over, often that's due to a quality problem. So it's looping back through, because you're having a quality problem that's getting checked, and then going back to get fixed, and then back again like that. So you can start to see some of these patterns for what the problems are based on what's happening in your process, mine data.

And then you also need to look at metrics that you might have.

So this is not something that you're necessarily going to see in process mining, from the process mining data. But you want to look at things like: Are the KPIs, the performance indicators that you have at the operational level, aligned with your customer goals, or even with your high level corporate goals? So, for example, you have one department that saying, Oh, we want to be as efficient as possible. But in gaining that efficiency, they reduce customer satisfaction.

That's a problem. Even though customer satisfaction may not be one of their local operational KPIs. It's definitely something that you're concerned about at the corporate level. And it's definitely something that your customers are concerned about.

So, you know, definitely something to, to worry about when you're looking at how these metrics are, might be misaligned with, with what's happening at the operational level and what you're trying to achieve from a corporate level.

Now, the next thing is around simulation. So, you've discovered your actual processes, you analyze them to determine what they should be. You've done some modeling of what you think those future state processes should be.

And the next thing you want to is simulate them to see if you can understand the impact that making these changes go on, the different KPIs, the different metrics that you have for the process.

So, simulation lets you do what if analysis on your processes without actually changing the real-world process. So that you understand what's going to happen when you do make that change, and over the world.

So, for example, wherewith, the work pile up, if our throughput volume was drastically increase.

So let's say you have 10 times as many ordered orders as you normally do, where things are going to pile up in your process.

What resources would be idle? If all of a sudden, your work went to one 10th of what it should be, which are people that would be sitting on the bench, not doing it.

If you have, if you have two parts of the process that are run in parallel instead of sequentially, how is that going to change your end to end cycle time?

And if you have specific tasks that are, that have been done by people now, and you automate them using robotic process automation or some other method, how much time and money are no safe?

So these are the kinds of things that you can model in your simulation, in a simulation tool, so that you can then run it through and have a good understanding of what impact it's going to have. You're going to be able to look at risks.

You're going with cost, resource usage, and really the outcomes of a simulation, or to help us understand how to do these tradeoffs. How do we trade off between positive cycle time?

I was being heard the best way to allocate allocate resources within processes.

And this isn't just about human resources for completing a task.

one of the most interesting simulation case studies that I saw was for a Small Distillery. and they had a huge increase in demand for their products.

And they wanted to know, they were taking some investment money in and they wanted to know what was the best way to spend it on these new that They were going to get for distilling their products.

And what they discovered is they get a process simulation of their distilling process.

And they found out that they actually had really low utilization rates of their current production events. And they could avoid making any new investment at all by just rescheduling your production.

So this allows them to do the same amount of work, Wish they are, they do much more work with the same resources, just by rescheduling how the work I've done.

And that's kind of an interesting lesson, in terms of, don't necessarily just throw money, throw more resources at it, but understand where the problems are, so that you know where to spend your money, or even if you need to spend your money.

Now, improving processes. This is usually where you start looking at automation. And, up to this point, everything that I've talked about has been around process analysis, not actually changing processes.

Processing case management systems can orchestrate the overall flow process. So you use them to do that workflow that goes over top of everything else, and they integrates with other systems. It can have, as I showed you, those, that diagram before from the process mining was that, we could have a process management system that then calls a, an ERP system, or calls an external service task.

And then task automation, you can use things like RPA to just mimic a user's actions.

Or you can start building integrations between applications that have not been previously integrated. So, these are all the kinds of things you can look at as you, as you start to do process improvement through automation.

Now, automated processes.

You can also look at automating the decisions and the rules that happen, and this can use the artificial intelligence and machine learning to make better rules or rules that will learn as they as they go along.

You can also have AL AI Machine Learning. Make recommendations at manual steps to help guide a worker so that they would get a next best action recommendation as they were moving onto the next steps. And, we see that a lot in things, like insurance claims that are very case driven, very knowledge worker driven. But, it helps to have some suggestions about what might be the next best thing to do in a particular case.

Now, once you've automated all of these processes and decisions, you're in a position to enable customer self-service. Because now, you can have a customer action on your website that can trigger a completely automated process, so that, that, obviously, brings you a lot of efficiencies there, and can really improve the customer satisfaction, too.

But, process improvement is not just about automation.

It can also come purely through procedural changes. This is like old-school business process re-engineering stuff and the kind of things that we see in Lean six Sigma.

So, you want to start by, as I mentioned before, aligning those operational KPIs with the customer journey. Make sure that you're doing the right things at the right time.

You want to put in some checkpoints to make sure that your manual processes are compliant.

Now, you can definitely have automation help with this, but it's still possible to have compliant procedures without automation. You just need to have some understanding as to where those checkpoints need to be to go in there.

Now, some of the biggest impacts are going to be from reducing handoffs between workers so that if one person gets a piece of work and completes it, then it doesn't have to be handed off to multiple people to do different parts of it.

And also removing unnecessary steps in the process. So, if you've done Lean six Sigma training, these are very familiar places that you would look for improvements. So as you start to model out your processes, analyze them, You're going to see things like, Oh, we can reduce the handoffs. And really get rid of some of these steps in here, that we don't need anymore.

Now, one of the things that we'll see as we reduce handoffs is that you now might need a worker to do more than one task or more than one type of tasks. And we'll also see places from process mining that showed a lot of looping back, which could indicate some sort of quality problem.

So you want to make sure that workers are properly trained for all the tasks that they need to perform as well.

Now, the last step in our cycle of fixing broken processes is to start monitoring the actual executing processes to see what's happening in real time. now. Things are gonna go wrong, and you want to be able to see that as it happens.

So, this is where we have real-time dashboards, and alerts, and all kinds of messaging that might come in here.

But, it's really not enough to just be reactive and respond once something has already gone wrong.

What you'd really like to have is some prediction of what's going to go wrong in the very near future. And then you can try to hit it off before that even happens. So let's say you have a lot of work piling up, and it's getting to the end of the day. I used to do a lot of work with the, with mutual fund, an investment companies. And if there were manual transactions that had to be entered, they had to be done by a cutoff time.

At the end of the day, And they would, by being able to see how much work was there and making a prediction about the resources required, in order to complete that work, they were able to then, immediately say, well, can we get these five people to stay overtime? Because that's what we're going to need in order to finish up the work before the end of the day-to-day. So these predictions will help you with things like resource planning.

Now, we can also look at Operational Insights, and this is going to combine data from process, mining, analysis, and simulation, and provide really a clearer view of what we need to do to keep things on track.

Ideally, you'd like to be able to compare currently, running processes against some of the conformance models that you used during mining and analysis, and then use this to make estimates about workload, as well as ensure compliance for these processes.

So what are the lessons, then?

for process intelligence in disruptive times?

We need to focus on intelligence process intelligence, not just blindly automate broken processes without understanding why they're broken or the best way to fix them.

So if your processes are disrupted by the current crisis, the first order of business is to understand what you're doing, and understand why it's going wrong, Not just to move things onto a new platform or throw more people at it.

So then once you have an understanding of the process, you can look at some automation or upgrading systems. You can look at data driven decisions and AI, for automating some of your decision, You can standardize your processes wherever possible, and then building some of this integration between different systems or use RPA. So that your workers aren't doing their routine activities.

Then, finally, you want to monitor your end to end process so that you see what's going wrong before it even happens, and compare your current processes against those ideal benchmarks. So, this is the cycle of fixing the processes.

But I really want to point out that we want to put the focus on process intelligence, through understanding and monitoring, not just automation, because a lot of companies are very broken processes right now. And you need to get those fixed.

So, I'm going to wrap up with some of the best practices for adapting processes to the current crisis situation.

So, you've seen a glimpse of what process and task mining can do to figure out your actual processes. And this should become a primary analysis tool.

Right now, process modeling and analysis can't be done in the usual ways, which is typically you'd have business analysts going around and doing job shadowing or in person interviews, observing how processes are done.

Right now, this is a great opportunity for business analysts to start using process and task mining to do remote data driven analysis in, in addition to their, you know, their usual toolkit.

one thing you really need to do, is you have to get physical documents out of the process.

So with that, through some sort of level of automation, moving physical paper between distributed workers is really slow And it's really expensive. And usually it's completely unnecessary.

You just convert all physical content. The minute it hits your company, you convert it to digital form, and then it just becomes part of the process, the distributed process.

Or even better, have customers upload it directly in digital form, so that it's never in a paper form at all, and then you don't even have to do the work of converting into digital form.

Distributed workers need to have a productive work environment, depending on the type of work that they have. This could mean collaboration tools, integrated chat systems, to work with customers, streamline data entry screens if they're doing data entry of some sort.

And all this needs to be sensitive to slower network speeds because it will be running over worker's home Internet connection, so they're not going to be directly plugged into your data center the way they might be if they're at the at, at your head office. It also has to be secure against malicious network intrusion, again, because you're working from their home internet connection.

And you're using things like VPN and so on to make sure that you have there, the right kind of protection available in there.

Now, work needs to be assigned and routed to the right person, at the right time, regardless of their physical location.

You can't have managers assessing and redistributing the workload by walking around. I see how many piles and things are in each person's desk, and I see that a lot in very paper centric, or content centric kind of organizations where there might be case files. And a manager literally walks around. It, looks at people's desks, and says, Oh, you've got 10, and you've only got two. Let's re-allocate. Some of these. There has to be other ways to get work to people. Make sure it's getting to the right person at the right time, and also for re-allocating works. At a manager can look virtually at how much work each person has and re-allocated if necessary.

Osh Automation, as I said, this is, I went through some of the automation things. Wherever you don't need to have human interaction, it's a good idea to start looking at automating tasks.

Now, replacing people with automation can be a really unpopular topic but the current upheaval is really an opportunity to rework your processes and automate tasks to really reduce the amount of routine work that's performed by workers.

Then lastly, you need to monitor all this. You have to monitor those end to end processes to make sure that everything is happening the way it's supposed to be happen.

Moving to a distributed work environment can really cause compliance problems, and it can also cause some. Some performance have some performance impacts on individual workers.

So you want to track what's happening, when it's happening and why it's happening in order to do that. And that's where the monitoring comes in.

So, this is how we bring all of these process intelligence capabilities and automation capabilities together, and how we need to impact our broken processes now in these current times.

Perfect.

Thank you, Sandy. So, my name is Pete Gaudy, I'm one of the County executives here at ..., and I focus on the process intelligence space.

So, really just quick 1, 1 slide before I get into the product here, to show you, it is just our approach to press intelligence.

And what we do is we take a two pronged approach to analyzing and adapting to the disruption that may be happening in your industry today.

So the the two prong approach starts with data driven process management. And so, that's a lot with Sandy, was talking about, the auto discovery, of your, of your processes, that fact, based insights that are coming out of data that resides in, your back end, systems, KPIs. And dashboards, and then live, monitoring, alerting, all all based on data, nothing that the humans are in there.

Keeping track of are loaded with data. And then bringing that together with the human centric approach, which is where you're, you're looking at, how things are going to change. So creating new ways of working, those future processes will be different. As Cindy pointed out, that the Dominoes Autonomous Pizza oven is not something that can be found in your, in your data today. It has to be designed by some of your, your skill stakeholders in the organization, and then being able to communicate and collaborate in a cloud setting, we're all this information resides, and everything is inter-related and connected in 1, 1 central location.

Very well.

Thank you, Sandy, for the presentation. She provides a great reveal of process mining from, from strategy.

Choose the tactics on how to get the most out of the technology by using process intelligence and business process management, and sound business practices for creating value for the organization, creating value for the customers as well.

Now, we are going to be taking a break. And when we come back at the top of the hour, we're going to be bringing live Ramesh who are born a girl, who is the Head of Digital Automation and Enterprise Architecture for Avaya.

Ramesh Wire is going to be talking about using Process Insights to drive transparency and productivity. While overcoming compliance compliance concerns. After ... presentation, we're gonna wrap up today's proceedings. And the conference was a great presentation from Satish ..., who is the lead Enterprise Architect for Mars. And Mars is an incredible digital transformation journey, with thousands of professionals engage in this, in this, in these activities. And they are having tremendous results, and in that journey. And the city, she's going to share some of that with us. The good, the bad, the ugly of coach, her business, and these transformations.

And he's going to specifically focus on how to map the real impact of process mining on the business, as you make the, this implementations. So, two great cross industry leaders, and practitioners of intelligent automation and process mining, joining us, to wrap up, day three, of process mining live. So, we're taking a break now. We will connect back up at the top of the hour. Thank you.

About the Author

Sandy Kemsley,
BPM Industry Analyst & Architect,
Kemsley Design.

Sandy Kemsley is an independent analyst and systems architect, specializing in digital process automation (DPA),  business process management (BPM), the social enterprise, enterprise architecture and business intelligence. During her career, she’s run product companies and service firms and worked for large organizations. She is also a globally-featured speaker on the topic of BPM and its impact on business.