Struggling with Inefficient Processes? Process Mining Can Help

April 3, 2023

Every organization contends with numerous moving parts that drive business forward. But they can be inefficient and convoluted – in fact, Forrester research shows that 71% of organizations use 10 or more applications for a single business process. To make matters worse, only 16% of companies have complete visibility over their own processes.  This is where process mining can help.

How can you gain more clarity so you can improve efficiency within your organization? That’s where process mining comes in. Here, we discuss how process mining paints a clear picture of processes exactly how they are – while showing you how to improve them.

Why process mining?

When working in ERP systems, every step you take leaves a digital footprint. Process mining generates an event log of this data and evaluates the path you’ve taken to identify inefficiencies and help you fix them. Process mining creates visualizations of processes at your organization as they really are, rather than how you think they are. This enables you to:

• Identify areas of inefficiency, e.g., unnecessary delivery blocks holding up an open sales order
• Reveal the causes of inefficiency, e.g., manual approval workflow required to release the delivery block, even though the block conditions are resolved.
• Help you understand their impact, e.g., increase in order cycle time of 2 days, and human processing time of 30 minutes.
• Provide the insight you need to fix problems, e.g., automate the removal of delivery blocks when certain criteria are met.

In ERPs like SAP, process mining extracts descriptive models from event logs to reconstruct the underlying business process flows. It provides a visual model of exactly how an end-to-end process, like Purchase to Pay or Order to Cash, is executed by your users and bots.

Process Optimization Roadblocks

Process mining is just one, albeit very important, tool in the ‘process optimization’ space. Process optimization is a common exercise for modern organizations that grants greater visibility into who’s responsible for what tasks, how those tasks are performed, and any waste that accumulates. This clarity allows leaders to make a cohesive plan to make meaningful improvement.

With the clear benefits process optimization offers, why isn’t it more common? That’s because discovering and fixing issues is difficult – 72% of companies use manual processes to evaluate processes.

Technology is key to making process discovery and optimization easier. Manual methods simply aren’t built to handle the technical complexity of most organizations. Decision-makers know this – and that’s why most have their eyes on process mining instead of traditional methods. 61% of organization leaders plan to implement process mining within the next year.

Benefits of Process Mining

Process mining goes far beyond traditional process optimization methods like interviews, lead time measurement, and performance analysis to deliver the desired insights into how your business is currently running. Instead of asking business users how processes are executed, process mining builds an accurate picture of why processes are conducted in the way they are by analyzing information in your ERP system that usually remains hidden.

This information allows your business to answer critical questions with greater precision than ever before:

• What is causing long lead times in subprocesses?
• Is one business unit/process performing better than others?
• What is the potential for process harmonization?
• How can I improve my key process KPIs?

Gain Insight into Your Processes

Angles Process Mining eliminates the traditional failings of many process mining tools by focusing on delivering accurate cross-process insights (e.g. connecting the purchasing process with the sales process) from your SAP system to our best-in-breed visualization platform. The Angles Enterprise platform is built on more than 20 years of expertise working with enterprise companies across the world to transform data from SAP systems into actionable insights. Angles delivers self-service operational reporting built on context-rich, process-aware data models that were designed to answer your most pressing business questions.

The breadth of Angles provides end-to-end process coverage for SAP ERP. Angles goes beyond the basics, like procure-to-pay or order-to-cash templates. It includes a comprehensive suite of ready-to-run processes like source to demand, contracts, schedule lines, shipments, requirements, workflow steps, and more, all connected in a robust relational data model. In addition, its innovative supply-and-demand matching algorithm creates unmatched transparency, even for Make-to-Order and Make-to-Stock processes. The depth of this tailored, prepackaged content lowers your team’s barrier to entry and provides quick access to deep ERP knowledge. Upon integration, Angles users can quickly start to calculate business KPIs like service level, delivery reliability, on-time-in-full, days sales outstanding, days payable outstanding, days inventory outstanding, and more.

Angles Process Mining is designed with business users in mind. Its modular architecture provides advanced throughput time analysis, bottleneck detection, and root cause analysis with an unmatched time to value.

Schedule a demo today to learn more about Angles for SAP.