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Even post-pandemic, chief procurement officers (CPOs) are still dealing with shortages, long lead times, and inflation. At the same time, businesses are mandating cost reductions (or at minimum, cost containment). Suppliers are having similar challenges. So, if you cant ask suppliers to reduce the price for incoming goods and services, what can you do?

Transforming business processes is the next frontier of savings opportunities for CPOs. Process mining is a great enabler to provide insights needed to transform processes. It can identify opportunities faster, more accurately, and more comprehensively than tools used in the past. Ill go into more detail on how process mining works below, but first its important to understand the difference between process mapping and process mining.

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Until recently, when there was a perceived need to improve a process, a business would usually go through a process mapping event. Thats a very people-driven exercise where someone is responsible for documenting a process from start to finish. They talk to the individuals involved in the process, identify the technology used, and create a visual workflow of how something gets done.

Then this map can be analyzed for breaks in the chain, redundant steps, bottlenecks, or other problems. Because it relies on input from humans, its the best representation of what people believe to be true. But it will never be completely accurate because its based on peoples interpretations of how things work. Its qualitative, not quantitative.

Process mining is the digital sibling of process mapping. Where process mapping is all about perceptions, process mining is all about data. In process mining, software containing data-mining algorithms is applied to the event logs of IT systems used by a company. The algorithm creates a workflow model based on the trends it sees in the event logs data.

By harvesting data, process mining can create a more accurate map of whats happening because it is quantitative, not qualitative. Whereas process mapping paints a picture of what the organization believes to be true, process mining reveals what is actually happening.

Research by Celonis, a process mining software provider and member of Acceleration Economys Top 10 AI/Hyperautomation Short List, identifies some great process mining use cases for procurement. These include:

One of my favorite use cases is identifying process automation opportunities based on repetitive tasks where the same kind of input or query is done over and over. Invoice entry is a task that comes to mind; process mining can dig deeper and identify similar opportunities that may not be evident.

Process mining isnt for every business. It relies on data-mining algorithms, which need data to function. The more manual the business, the less reliable process mining results are. But for large or complex organizations, process mining is an opportunity to see what is truly happening and identify opportunities to transform processes.

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Process Mining Builds On Process Mapping With Data for Greater ... - Acceleration Economy