Session Information:

The Future of Process Mining

Recent acquisitions, and new product announcements will have a profound impact on the process mining market. How these changes may come about and how quickly could significantly impact what tools or vendors should be on your shortlist. But it is not just the vendor landscape that is changing, the scope, language and objectives of process mining are changing too. 

A vendor neutral session that will cover, among other topics:

• What are the shifts occurring and What’s the impact?
• Moving From Process Mining to Process Intelligence.
• Process Mining as a Capability Not a Product.
• Tasks, Processes and Journeys Are All Connected.
• Looking to the Future.

If you have been investigating or evaluating Process Mining products, then this session will be a must watch, sure to be controversial, always inciteful Mark will blow away the cobwebs and see beyond any rose-tinted glasses.

Session Transcript:

And I am very excited about our next guest. This gas is coming from Birmingham in the UK. directly to our global audience through this conference, and the, and that is Mark MacGregor March is, Will be familiar to regular attendees at our events. He has shared with us on his expertise on enterprise architecture process management. And today he's gonna go onto process Mining. And the future of process mining, Mark, has deep expertise, and experiences with more than 25 years of experience and work directly across the vendor's analyst, firms and end user organizations. Mark always has interesting insights to share. There are often the driver of lively discussions, And I very much look forward to your questions to mark a real practitioner.

And for us to engage with him in the Q&A in the end, ask your questions, as Mark is presenting his topics. I guarantee you, there's going to be a masterclass on process mining and the future of process mining. Mark, thanks for taking the time to share your expertise of our global audience today.

Thanks, Jose, and thanks, Brian, for inviting me. It's an absolute pleasure, too.

Be here with you all, and I'm just going to move myself out of the way, so that I can Focus on you guys.

Brilliant, OK, so the future of process mining.

Now, as I look to the future, everyone, as we know, has got a bit of a bias.

So I want to just get out of the way where my biases, so some of you are familiar with the fact that, although I work as an independent consultant, that, I've been working with the team at Abby.

So, obviously, that's going to have shaped, and my thinking, for those of you that are connected with me on LinkedIn, you'll know that I've recently also started to do some work with a small company called Work Pulse specializing, OK? All software, so connecting strategy with execution. And then a small French company. some of you may have heard of in the enterprise architecture space, called accelerant. So, those are people that I'm working with at the moment. And so, a front of mind when I think of the things that that I want to share with you today.

But, prior to that, you know, never mind the fact that I spent time as some of you know, as an analyst with Gartner. I've also worked with scenario, with Linux, plan view, open *** case wise, and Global 360.

So, all of these things, where my bias comes from. So, as you're listening to what I'm saying, and you're thinking, well, hang on. I'm not sure whether I agree with that or disagree, and that's OK, right? Because that's the great thing about this we can think for ourselves.

I just wanted to share with you where my biases are coming from.

So you can take that into account, as we look in and share. So, let's dive in a little deeper.

So, it's a really hot topic.

I know, from talking with Brian, this is one of the best events that we've had in terms of registrations, and attendees just show, showing just how hot the topic of process mining is.

But I'm also sure that most of you who are attending will know that actually, there's a number of shifts that have been occurring really over.

Certainly, in the last three months or significant shifts that you're going to talk to, the shifts have been occurring now for almost two years.

So less than some of those significant events, and there are many others, but just some that I wanted to focus on.

So yeah, in May 2019 we see the Abbe acquisition of timeline PI.

You know, over the same year, we see UI path acquiring process gold.

We see mindset raising, some small investment to take them to the next level.

But then we start to see some other more interesting things going on more recently with the investment into app from all last year.

But the investment in Apple, more? A lot of it coming from G beta X now if but for those of you that don't know, G recheck GB check, her modeling tool vendors.

So we see a modeling tool vendor partnering with and investing in a process mining vendor.

Then, just last year, we saw slowness, making all their announcements around that new execution management system as they seek to appear to pivot from being a pure play process, mining vendor into what they are now seeing the execution management space.

And then the one that's most front of mind for many people, is the Sappy acquisition of ...

happening, Warlick fairly closed a couple of weeks ago.

I mean, these are significant things that don't just impact the tools that we buy, or how people might use it, but impact the market overall. So let's look at just some of those impacts.

So we're now seeing that adding, monitoring, a mining to intelligent content automation is providing an easier and richer way to actually monitor what's going on around our content and the automation that's going on there and making sure that we can ensure conformance variance compliance, but also to make sure that we're applying that automation in the right places.

Now, with a UI path, of course, what we're seeing is the adding of process mining into the RPA stack. So we've got, on one hand, we've got the blending with contract automation.

Then we see, moving it into the RPA stack.

As I've mentioned, was a GB check. We've seen another continued merging of modeling of mining, which some of you will know is a topic that I spoke about last year at this event where we looked specifically around that and so I'm not going to talk a lot about that today.

But if you go back and look at the replays, and we can look at the modeling management, a mining question, So it's up there on the replays.

Then we say with that slowness announcement, you know, a large player looking to seek growth outside of process mining, implying that maybe all is not what we might think in that pure play process, mining space.

And then, with SEP, what we're seeing is ERP vendors, now seeking to offer a full service solution.

I want to emphasize that full service solution because a lot of commentators have focused around, you know, Sappy acquiring a scenario just for the process mining.

Um, I don't want to say what ... mine, I don't know what was in their heads when they made the acquisition.

But I'm pretty sure that we need to take into account the actually scenarios modeling pace probably had as much to do with that decision as as the mining pace. And indeed, I'm gonna give you a link later on where I can share an article that I produced on BP Trends, which specifically looks at the impact of the sap acquisition of scenario. And, in that, I talk about the fact that sap, we're actually want to signal, will be as largest customers.

So, with all those changes going on, what we actually now have is five well funded players in the process mining multigrain: Si P UI Path, habeas aloneness, that I've mentioned.

But what I haven't yet mentioned, of course, and we shouldn't forget, is Soft ....

Software AG. I've been in the process mining space for a lot longer than most other vendors.

They're not necessarily front of mind.

For a lot of people, I know that they weren't sharing here at this event, so that it's good at that.

Getting that message out there a little more, but these are five very large, well funded vendors, all going in different directions.

This is going to have an impact, not just in terms of how the shows are used, but what tools are available and quite frankly, the viability for some of the vendors going forward.

So I wanted to share a little bit about the market overall. Now, some of you may have seen some of these things where analysts estimate that the current market is between 500 million.

So, you know, some of you might have seen some Gartner numbers. Some of you might have seen Forester or other analysts.

But in a rough area. The suggesting is between 500 million.

And apologies for the typo on this, but they see it growing, and they suggested it's going to grow between 800 million, one point four billion by 2023, which is a pretty significant growth.

For what it's worth. My personal view is that the market today is really only around about 150 million.

But none of those things matter.

Because, actually, all of these estimates are misleading. Whether it's the analysts' mine, doesn't matter.

Because, actually, those estimates are based on looking at rent vendor revenues, and the forecasted when the growth, so when the X is at 10 million, and they're going to grow, 50% to 15 million and adding all that together.

But recently, I've been talking a lot to some management consultancies and investors.

And one of the things that's been interesting working with those guys is that their frustration, often, when looking is the very little research is being done into what is the total addressable market.

So, never mind what part of the market the vendors are doing. What's the addressable market?

Or what's the market penetration?

So, I've been doing some research over the last couple of weeks, specifically into these areas.

And I estimate that actually the total addressable market for process mining is somewhere between 6.5, and $12.5 billion.

This suggests that the vendors, as I say, here, are only addressing three to 7% of that potential market.

And that's a bit of a mismatch, isn't it, So that's saying that even with those suggesting certain vendors a gorilla is the £800 gorilla in the market.

Does the £800 gorilla?

Let's suppose, they, owned, 70% of, the market, 70%, 3%, 2.1%, 2 five per cent.

They don't own that much of the market.

So, even though we're seeing process mining be more successful today than it has been for the last 15 years, it's got a long way to go before it could be seen as being successful.

So we're going to take a little bit of a dive into some of the switches here, and then we'll come back and question whether we'll ever actually see that potential being realized.

So I'm in the process of considering a new car, and for anyone that doesn't recognize that I'm, I'm thinking about changing my Volvo and going Mercedes.

And it's the GLA that we see here, that that's Kashi Maya at the moment.

I want to use the call to give us some examples of how we should be thinking differently about process modeling technology.

and you know, as I say in the title, about about shift from mining to intelligence.

Because often, when you hear, whether it's other sessions, whether it's vendors, whether it's even internally talking about it, you're often start with, well, you know, we're, we're gonna start mining, we're gonna plug it into these systems, and we're gonna, really, when I get into this car, and test, drive it now, I don't know. If I get to test, Drive it, get some nice Lakes like this. Although it actually looks like it could be off the road.

The thing that strikes me, when I'm sitting here, is it's been simplified.

There's a certain simplification and elegance. Now I happen to be big being a bit of a technologist.

The one thing that I love about these new Mercedes is that dashboard, the 212.5 inch screens.

Some of the things that I find interesting is that bombard, me with information, I don't get in there and say right, well the first thing I want you to do is to have a look into the fuel tank and measure where this isn't telling me how this plugin, and let me, let me talk to you about the energy management system.

No.

No, it's about, My experiences are drivers.

You just simply turn it on, select comfort or eco mode and a way we can start going is providing me the information that I need but only what I need when I need it?

It's not drowning me.

So, but it's also got a whole bunch of things going on in there, which make it a pretty intelligent car, right?

So let's think about it. You know, sell them in this new call, Lane assist, Blindspot information, Emergency Call Assist, it's got auto braking, adaptive, cruise control, all of these things going on. And they're amazing aids for the driver.

But how many of them do I see when I'm looking at the dashboard?

Very little, they're available when I need them.

And particularly when I think about process intelligence, now, I like the Lane Assist example and I'm not going to give you loads of these examples. Just start thinking about them.

You're driving your car along and you've got it on cruise control.

And that's great.

But suddenly, you start to drift what the light comes on and on the wheel adjusted, it recognizes that even when everything is running smoothly, you need to be monitoring.

You need to be monitoring and you need to be making suggestions as to when drift or variance non conformists is occurring.

I'm bringing some things back into line.

So that's an example, with things like blindspot Information, and Lane Assist, with a driver aids, through the monitoring, that's advising me as the user, when to make a change.

There are other situations, and I think adaptive cruise control is an interesting example, where the car says, actually, the vehicle in front slowing down, I'm gonna slow you down, Oh, they're speeding up.

We can speed up, and it's making the change. For me.

It's predicting what's going on.

I'm making the changes, but the changes are not, oh, I'm just going to break, or I'm just going to accelerate is looking at the whole picture, and ensuring that the throughput of the entire process, it's working seamlessly.

So that's just a couple of quick examples from the driving perspective. Now, let's think about it from the navigation perspective.

You get in the car, And, of course, the first thing it does is ask you to connect your mapping software and your probes, and to run maps of everywhere in the world, and to connect all the different places.

No, those are already done.

What else you forest? Where do you want to go?

OK, so now I know your destination. I already know where you are.

Therefore, I can calculate the route, so it's focusing around the outcomes.

Now, again, we've got things like lighting guidance, or, hey, we're going to come off the motorway. The order on the freeway.

Whatever it is, where you all take, the left turn lane, be prepared to emerge, left, take the next essay on the riaa, et cetera.

So it's intelligently re routing, replanning, So it doesn't just give us a singular route.

It recognizes that there are changes occurring, and it needs to adapt accordingly.

But process intelligence does the same thing for our business. It enables us to do those things.

The one thing that I think most of us would agree is that whatever navigation system we're using, whether it's this or whether it's a call play, Android wage, doesn't really matter.

We're reliant on real-time traffic information, because we know that the route that we're going to go down, things change.

Accidents happen.

Roadworks happen, when each diver, DVA, etcetera.

We rely on the fact that, and navigation system is constantly monitoring those things, providing us with inputs and advice.

So, Process Intelligence will provide what I call our TPI, real-time process information.

So that we're not just looking at having mind that process once and ignore it.

We're looking, say, aha, we need to keep looking at it, and keep planning, so you might use different analogies. These are ones that work for me.

So then we come on to looking at process mining as a capability.

So I have already talked about the factor, as a capability, The capabilities we want is monitoring the performance within and across processes.

We want alerts, as I mentioned, for that variation in conformance.

As I'll illustrate on the dashboard, we want simple, an easy to comprehend visuals.

We also want a separation of concerns between users and analysts.

So I will take my car example, my current call, which is a Volvo, recently came up and told me that the ... wasn't work working correctly and that I should take you to a gallery.

So, why don't you get to the Gare age, booked it in? Just think the technician had to work from just that stop start not working, seek service?

No.

The technician was then able to plug the diagnostics in get far more information, all the batteries, not charging the battery charge level, because they knew a whole bunch more about that car than I did, because I, as a user, there's no point in presenting me all that information, it's not relevant to me.

If I'm the analyst, or developer looking to make change or fix something, then I need additional or different information.

one of the things that we all look at, and a lot of people now talk about if we take the car example, is, we want non intrusive monitoring, just needs to be there without getting in our way.

Stay with our car examples that I've already mentioned. The call play an Android auto. Well, we need it to be easily set to multiple systems, right?

Because even if we've got that inbuilt Mercedes navigation, we may choose to plug our phone in, particularly, there's an i-phone, and then we, whether we're using Apple Maps, whether we're using garmon, whether we're using Google Maps, or something else.

We still want to be running it through that system. So we want to easily connect to multiple systems.

And of course, even the underlying mapping in those calls these days is increasingly Gamino Tom Tom, as an embedded system.

We also want the ability to test hypothesis.

Yeah. I think this is where I'm looking at putting in some new robotic process information but it's not the right thing to do.

If I go back to no Lean thinking, Toyota style, I'm just going to put in a robot sub, optimize something that I think looks great, but all I'm doing is moving the cue from one place to another.

Or am I looking at the overall flow.

Could there be somewhere else, where plying smaller amount of automation may increase the overall flow.

I don't know, but can I test those ideas?

Those things can easily be integrated into those other systems.

Because, if we see that, combination with the RPA stacks, the content automation stacks, the ERP ***, Then, as we're going to see increasingly process mining, or process intelligence, as a capability is going to be integrated into other places.

So, I suggest that when we look at process mining tools, actually, some of the key features we're going to be looking at for the future, around APIs, customizable, Elysee, configure, Ability, OEM ability, these are going to be the next frontiers that define success or failure for many vendors.

The other thing that I want you to care a little bit about's tasks, processes and journeys, was I'm showing them, hey, journeys processing tasks, but sorry, to confuse you by showing it both ways round.

Because one of the challenges that I believe we all face is that increasingly, process mining vendors are talking about doing toss mining, toss mining vendors, and indeed, some BI vendors are actually talking about process analytics, and process mining.

I don't know about, you guys, but sometimes I scratch my head because I kind of feel that everyone is frightening all over the place, in terms of the language they're using.

Which makes it kinda tough for people, like you, and people like me, to actually work out, Well, which is the right product to solve the right problem?

Because a journey is not a process, a process is not at all.

Going to toss is not a process, OK, so in my mind, we have our Customer Journeys.

We can think of them as if you'd like as a modern day idea of a value chain.

But the chain is from the customer's perspective. So whether it's the customer, employee, patient, user, whether it's a document, it's, what steps does it go through?

And that may or may not be within your process or within your system, and it may be across processes and across systems, and it may be menu.

But inevitably, there are going to be intersections where the journey next with the process.

Now, I want to drill and be able to drill down into my process.

and that process, maybe as Angela and maybe it's discrete, doesn't really matter, because a lot of end to end processes are not the end to end processes that you might think rarely does in order to cash or procure to pay exist. Totally within a single ERP system.

That's the vendor's implementation of that piece of the jigsaw.

But even then, within the process, the process as an all occur within a, within systems.

Nevermind a single system because there's points at which the URI has users interact with those systems. Or we interact with each other.

And that's what we're looking at asks, When we're looking at TASC mining, there are three different types of things in my mind that you can be looking at.

You can be looking at specific, which is typically what the RPI vendors are doing. Pay. You want to automate this specific task. He run my desktop ricotta, record yourself running this task, replay back, program, the bulk, And now the bots going to do it.

That's good, too.

Run the recorder for a little bit longer and derive some of the tasks that you as users might be doing, or how they might be doing. Great.

What about discovering tasks that we didn't even know existed?

So for the last two, the derived to discover, this relies on long running recorder.

So not just running a recorder while you're doing a specific task, but running a recorder, four hours, where you're doing just your normal daily work.

And the system is starting to piece together that said, aha, this, this, and this, really, they belonged together as a task, this additional labor, altogether as a talks.

Maybe it's a system change. Maybe it's a bot. Maybe it's hyper automation. But there are different ways of doing it.

So, they're not the same analysis. now, here, as, I say, I have a bias. In this case, I happen to use amie, because he's one of the few vendors that, actually, he's doing the journey process.

and text mining as separate pieces, if you like, within the same product.

So, not forcing process mining to do charles' mining, but actually providing the products, they require different capabilities.

From what I'm seeing, I think, ideally, having them integrated into one solution that does them all is the smaller, and better way.

So, how else could we, and should we be looking at process mining, or processes intelligence?

Well, I suggest that process mining is actually continuous process improvement for the 21st century.

So don't be fooled by those adverse of $10 million gains. Instead, think about improving all processes. I'm a fan of professional cycling, and anyone that follows it will know the Team Sky or Team ..., as they are now completely transformed the world of how riders prepare our teams to prepare and how race is a wrong.

They've been incredibly successful, some people resent it, some people admire it.

But it was all done through the concept of marginal gains.

David Brailsford, the manager, and original owner of the team, was saying that, actually, we're going to stop looking for the single big win.

On each day, we've got to start improving each little pace.

Because if we can improve lots of little pieces, then the amplification of those gains is going to be far greater.

I suggest the continuous process improvement is often proved elusive in the past is really well suited to the systemized ones.

Because if we run the monitoring and we've got the conformance, and we understand the drift, and we're seeing that on a day-by-day basis, is much easier to get that continuous improvement.

And if we do that, then, not, can we just automate, but we can continuously improve and optimize.

But when I do that, I want you to also bear in mind that improvement isn't transformation.

If we take a ridiculous example and say, David ...

team, Sky, couldn't do marginal gains and be wildly successful, but it won't turn them into a Le Mans 24 hour call when I will it.

Because that all they're doing is optimizing bike racing.

So if we want to transform the way that we serve customers with new products, new services, then the mining might help us understand a little about some of our processes, but it's not going to help us transform.

So we've done the monitoring. We looked at how we can run continuous improvement. We know we've got to do some discovery and analysis.

But if you haven't noticed that, when you start talking to people about process mining, it's often, you know, seems like people are talking about an MRI scanner, really expensive, used by a few specialist people.

And yet, if we can stop thinking about it more like an ultrasound.

And we can make it easier to use like an ultrasound.

We're going to broaden the applicability, consider what would it mean to you and other organizations if every business and process analyst was able to apply and use process, mining, follow parts of the process, so it was applicable for it's a simple decision, and it's really a vendor decision.

First and foremost, do we want to sell a few MRIs and B, addressing two to 3% of the process mining market?

What do we want to get to 30, 40, 50% of the market, in which case, actually, we need to be selling a lot of ultrasounds?

Hopefully he goes, benefits and those values, starting to resonate with you.

Because it's only when those types of things that I've been talking about start to resonate with you as individuals and with your managers and the execs and within your business.

Yeah, actually, are willing.

Interested in doing the process discovery, because higher up the business.

I can assure you, the process discovery just sounds expensive, takes time.

Complicated, not easy.

I'm not going to want to do it, unless I've bought into the benefits.

So going back to our semi autonomous, autonomous cars, some of you may have heard me talk about it before, but I was talking with a senior exec from a large auto manufacturer a couple of years ago.

And they were saying that the single thing that gets in their way, the biggest barrier, the moving self driving, or semi autonomous cars forward, isn't regulation. It isn't technology.

It's actually having accurate details up to date mapping.

So why is it that we think in our business?

So we will ever be able to make those kind of equivalent decision staring at this our car as the business around, without accurate mapping or without detail in those maps.

So self driving cars can't function.

We can either, you know, our systems may be easier than roads, but in both cases, roadblocks are going to occur.

So we need to find ways of having that level of detail and in the easiest way possible.

And where we have systemized processes gen, It doesn't make any sense to use anything other than process mining and automated process discovery.

There's just no other way of doing it.

You actually can't do it manually.

Because even when you try and do it manually, you're still relying on extracting knowledge, data, logs, or whatever in a systematic way, even if you're going to perform a manual analysis of that information.

So, turn into the future.

Excuse me. Just to start to bring us to the close here. So we've got some time, some discussion.

These are my predictions for the process money market.

I'm not alone. So in the first one is, I don't believe that the process mining market, as a standalone market will exist, and I believe it will disappear within 18 to 24 months.

I'm not gonna name names on here, but your former colleagues of mine likened it to the business rules market, lots of potential, but it was never going to see the light of day.

As a standalone market, process mining is a capability, will continue to exist, But I believe it's going to be consumed into products that address multiple other markets and will grow in use.

I think as we look at the rest of this year, we're going to see a lot more in terms of partnerships and acquisitions. And that will continue to drive our headlines for 2021.

I still think unfortunately, much as I would love to see clarity, that we're going to see continued confusion and overlapping marketing messages between the task, the process, and the journeys.

However, sadly, I believe that that's also going to contribute to slowing down rather than speeding up potential uptake, because it's going to be too confusing for us to actually work out how to take on a product, who to believe, how to use it.

I also think we're going to see a little bit of a bifurcation on pricing.

So, I think some players will take process mining capability, drive it down, so it becomes a little bit like modeling them, applies to that general business analyst market, so much lower price.

Less thinking about the value of the problem, and more thinking about how much an individual might be willing to spend for the capability.

Then we're going to see it go the other way.

where we see them moving, almost as a business monitoring type system, a lot of like the business intelligence and analytics stuff, where monitoring will be sold high, as an enterprise solution, French price value. So, in one case, we are going to be selling to users, and the other case is going to be an enterprise pricing.

You may wish to discuss that. You might be getting ready to type your questions into josy now, to get ready to discuss. And I'm happy to dig into those, but from what I'm seeing, and that's my predictions as to where it's going.

So what does it mean for those of you that are looking to evaluate or acquire the technology?

Well, my suggestions are, when are you evaluating the technologies, focus on the vendor, viability roles within the technical guide. We'll see.

I don't think you'll find there's enough differentiation between products that you should be excited by something that's radically new. So focus on that vendor viability, that's gonna be more important to you.

Make sure that you give full consideration to how whatever solution you thinking about is going to fit in your current vendor ecosystem, OK? The other tools you use, the other systems, et cetera.

Despite what I've said about where the market's going, please don't allow those potential disruptions to prevent the implementations. It's, it's not a big deal.

Because, actually, the cost of moving from one vendor to another is not that high. So there's not that much risk there.

Go ahead. The value that you can gain from it is more than you're gonna get from the risk of making a bad decision.

Don't be afraid to consider multiple solutions in the short-term.

You may find the, you've got a particular vendor that you want to use for one particular type of system based on there, wonderfully amazing monitoring, but you might want to use a different vendor if you're getting closer to the analyst community.

It's no big deal. And really, in the short term, it doesn't matter having multiple solutions.

Don't be fooled by the vendor heit.

There are a number of people out there making some, quite frankly, ridiculous claims. You know, I'm saying things like first, free, well, hang on a minute.

There's been three products in this space for a long time.

So don't be full by the vendor hype.

Do focus your efforts on the technologies and capabilities that address multiple opportunities. So even if someone says, wow, we can, yeah, well, we're not sure how we're going to deal with that problem, but we're really good at this problem.

Don't let them derail you.

You need solutions that are going to address multiple process challenges.

And if you take, follow this advice, then I think you're going to be a good place.

I hope that nothing that I've said puts you off leveraging and using mining process intelligence because you really shouldn't. It's an amazing technology.

But on the other hand, you need to be clear on where it's going overall and it may be that you start talking to your LP, or RPA or other vendors as to what they're going to be doing.

I'm with that.

I thank you for your attention.

I'm going to stop sharing my screen now and invite, pose A two, come back and join us.

..., always insightful, thought provoking, and lots of comments and the, and the questions coming your way as a result of that. So many people saying thank you. Great presentation, great insights. Let's, let's get on with some of the some of the first two questions here. And one of the themes that I would like to summarize and, and and ask you about, is that you're implying that, you know, process mining as a pure play is, has, kinda, we'll have a short life and that. So, so, first of all, I want to confirm that, that, that's kind of a view that you have based on your understanding of the market. And then, and then, what will, what will be absorbed by the part off Going for it and what? How is it going?

If all is good, is it going to evolve in your view Short. So, you're absolutely right.

Yes, I am categoric in stating my belief that the market, as a process money market, will disappear.

So, I'll go as far as to say, the only thing I'm unsure about is maybe my timing estimate may be slightly out.

Now, I do want to also say, though, that even when that disappears, in my mind, is a mainstream market.

There will still be a number of small vendors operating in that niche, because not everyone is trying to grow a billion dollar business.

There are going to be some great technologists with a brilliant idea that, quite frankly, although they don't like to measure you, and I know from our experience, if they can just admit that actually, we want to build a lifestyle business. Where we have our 2030 employees. Who feel good companies work to serve the communities that they work in, and are able to feed their families. That's good. There's nothing wrong with that. Not everyone has to be that billion dollar organization. So, I think there's gonna be a number of those smaller players that are out there, solving specialist problems.

And I wish them, great luck.

The other piece that you mentioned there is if we look up UI path and what they've done.

I apologize for the guy's UI path that may have been presenting a different story. But, when I look at it, I don't seek them out there in the mainstream market.

I don't see UI path, talking about process mining without talking about RPA. And it makes sense, you know, most of the revenues coming from RPA.

But of course, they've got process mining.

And in the RPA space, they've got a leg up over their competitors by combining the two things together.

Now we see CP having mining investec.

Well, how long can the other ERP vendors go on without saying, Well, gee, hang on a minute, I need to put process money in my stack.

So if the other RPA vendors have to respond and the other ERP vendors have to respond pretty soon, There's nothing much left, and it becomes a capability in the larger pace.

But, I also will throw one other thing out there, which is if we look at the monitoring and the conformance, at what point does process analytics start to merge with business intelligence?

So, will we see the traditional business intelligence analytics vendors saying, Well, no.

It's actually by the time, these God builds the dashboarding and we've got the dashboarding and we've got the connectors Well, why don't we just acquired that pace, will really, doing business intelligence by looking at data and process, not just data.

So those are three of the obvious places in my mind.

So, around that theme again, we can talk about this barrage for a few hours but they are bass here to summarize. So do you two questions? Let me start first. Do you feel that it's a natural tendency for process mining functions to become part of ERP systems as well? Do you think there's going to be more consolidation on ERP systems, looking to absorb some of this process mining capabilities, And on and subsequent? And I follow up on that. Do you see RPA going the same route as process mining, in terms of being absorbed over time? Or do you see that RPA will remain independent?

G has I always asked me they.

The questions, I just think. Brian, why don't you give us an hour discussion in one of these slots, Suppose I like, because we don't need the presentation. Because these are big topics in themselves. So.

The short answer is, RPA should have been consumed.

But it's Defied the normal laws of software.

And that is that a few vendors got some very big valuations, which meant that where they would traditionally have been acquired a much smaller they now have evaluations.

Now, I'm not sustainable, Which is kind of interesting because, you know, if you take the sap example, then they bawl context, a very small RPA vendor. Why?

Because the build versus buy decision wasn't making sense by, has historically been the approach in the space that we're operating.

But when you start seeing, I'm gonna say crazy evaluations because most people don't necessarily believe in the less broad nature, just a singular RPA in the hyper automation space.

The vendors are getting evaluations that don't make any logical sense, which means that actually, they're creating more competitors because I can no longer afford to buy one, I have to build.

So, suddenly, it's getting squeezed, so I don't, yeah, I'm really interesting to see whether, um, we just find RPA disappearing in 3 to 5 years.

And all the other vendors will rush to the hyper automation. So, if you like the RPA V three.

and trap them in the, in the early place, or whether we'll see more acquisitions or RPI, and there's not anything we've seen, seeing those guys using those valuations, to turn the market on his head. Yeah. We should have seen more acquisition. And shall we say, a customer experience into RPA or more acquisitions of process mining vendors by then not using that valuation?

Visibly, to move out of that space, which is kind of interesting because, to me, it's a burning platform agree. It's really interesting. Perspectives. You have there may be a part of, part of their strategy is to remain a pure play for a period of time and the value that way. And as you said, maybe a bit over value, pronounced time hotel, and the, but there'll be some interesting developments coming through 1, 1, 1 final quick question here, For those who are actually in the process of using process mining, there are starting to implemented and they come to your presentation. I was like, they start to freak out. Because like, I'm not sure what I should be doing anymore.

Is how they, how did they take it forward? They started doing some process mining. Do you still see value in the process? Mining activities that they can do in the organization? Or you say, you know, this is a train that's going in a direction that you went on a goal. get out of the train. So what is your perspective on those who have already started down this path?

Keep going.

Absolutely, it doesn't say remember, really clearly, I was only talking about where the process money exists as a standalone market for products, as opposed to OK royalty.

I think we can be really, the capability is not going to go away.

OK, I'm a fan, a Post it Notes and, Manual Type workshopping.

Everybody knows that, and I don't subscribe to, and I resent when people tell me that automated process mining can get rid of that and replace it, for me, It cannot, Because you're only mining system information.

I can workshop on white post, whether it's manual, in this system, it doesn't matter.

And there's other dynamics at play.

But another graphic that I use, if you imagine sitting there at your post it wall on there, you've got everything.

Now, imagine that sitting standing in front of the wall incentive, Malkin Jose is R two, D, two, and C three PO.

The one thing, you can be sure, always, they're not telling you what they do.

So, if you've already got it in the system, the only way to extract it from systems is through some kind of automated process discovery or process mining.

So, it's absolutely not going away, but it just may not be in the products that you might thought it was in the future.

But I also want to re-iterate something else that I made, and I think this is important as well, Don't be afraid, because actually the switching cost from capability age, the vendor beach events, is pretty low.

So it's not something that you find if you started off going down a path, using one vendor, and you had to change, you're not going to be in a situation where someone says, well, hang on, we've invested a fortune in this particular node, because all of the analysis that you did, you can re-use, you might have to rebuild some dashboards, and you might have to get used to a bit of a different user interface.

But this is one of the other problems for the process mining vendors. And I talk about this with the investors all the time.

The switching costs is minimal.

That's right, Mark. We're out of time now, but I want to thank you so much for sharing expertise. It's always a masterclass on this technological areas. And I always learn so much by listening to and engaging with you, as you and I discussed before. We can probably just have a 45 minute Q and A and this and that would not be enough. And so, let's thank you so much from Birmingham in the UK to over 2000 participants in our global audience in this in this session. Thank you for sharing expertise of all of us.

Jose, a pleasure as ever.

Take care everybody.

Thank you ladies and gentlemen. That's marked McGregor there for us and they're always again a masterclass and we're grateful that that that he's able to share his expertise with all of us today, we're going to go from Birmingham to London. Next, I'm going to welcome at the top of the hour Choo choo Industry Leaders in BPM. So, we're gonna add, some of, you ask questions about BPM that I didn't have time to get to during this Q&A. We're going to have the next session focus on Improving Customer Experience CX, Excellence using, process mining. And we're going to go deeper onto the, onto the BPM and modeling side of things.

And so, we're looking at how we translate CX and see strategy into tangible results for strategic alignment of customer strategy with operational processes that Caitlin and, and the cache will discuss, and demonstrate their approach to delivering customer experience improvements, and how the digital tool sets have evolved in this space. So, another fascinating view of, of process mining, in the context of the customer experience journey. So, I see you all at the top of the hour, remember, if you want to have other questions, if you want to interact with our speakers, if you want to ask questions, or just say thank you for sharing your expertise. Look, under my name is Joseph ... on LinkedIn, I have a post in there about this conference. And, now, if you submit your questions there, you know your comments. And I will, I will be updating with a summary of today, and tomorrow, sometime probably tomorrow. And, and, I know, I look forward to engaging with you in that discussion during And after the conference. So, far now, Wrapping up here, see you back at the top of the hour.