Process Management 3 mins read

Thoughts on the Future of Process Mining

The first International Conference on Process Mining (ICPM) was a thought-provoking event where it emerged that the process mining future for ARIS is bright.

Julian Krumeich Julian Krumeich

The first International Conference on Process Mining (ICPM) was a thought-provoking event where it emerged that the process mining future for ARIS is bright.

Here are some of the main trends and discussions that arose from the conference.

  1. Converging tools

One of the most important developments we currently see in the market is a convergence of business process analysis tools, used for designing processes and publishing them throughout an organization, with process mining tools.

In an interview with Gartner’s Marc Kerremans, Professor Wil van der Aalst, professor at RWTH Aachen University, leading the Process and Data Science group, said: “…Today’s organizations still use business process modeling tools to document and discuss their processes (e.g., using the BPMN notation). These modeling tools are disconnected from the traditional process mining tools… Seamlessly integrating process mining and process modeling is a necessity.”

  1. Evolution of use cases

While the original focus for use cases was on process performance management (PPM), i.e. measuring process performance indicators (PPI) and linking them to traditional key performance indicators (KPI), the main application domain has shifted to a more structural discovery and analysis of processes. As more and more customers have implemented this, they are adopting two increasingly important use cases: Process conformance checking and process enhancement.

  1. Three new drivers

Process mining tools have been predominantly supplied with data from conventional (business) application systems. In the future, we will see three increasingly important application domains that provide tremendous amounts of data helping to achieve operational excellence – and to build up a solid basis for making fact-based decision to transform organizations.

  1. The Internet of Things (IoT). Increasing amounts of data from physical devices will be used to analyze behavioral aspects of an organization. As such, it will be important to integrate process mining systems with IoT platforms.
  2. Internal with external. It is not only about analyzing internal processes, but also about linking and integrating the external, customer-oriented perspectives with process mining to create even more value for customers.
  3. Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Process mining can reveal the actual potential for automating tasks in your processes. In addition, it is important to keep track of your entire optimization and automation journey: If you only automate single spots in your processes, you cannot ensure that the entire end-to-end process chain is really optimized.

So, will process mining replace well-established domains? Even though process mining is becoming increasingly important and ensures the success of organizations, it will not replace established domains like business process modeling. It will rather become an essential building block in these areas.

You can learn more by watching the video below.

For more information on ARIS Process Mining visit https://www.softwareag.com/en_corporate/platform/aris/process-mining.html