If you have experienced the PegaWorld iNspire event this year, you have heard about the exciting new Pega application that is now available; Pega Process Mining. In May 2022, Pega acquired the process mining software company Everflow, and they have now released their first combined product. Richard van Tol has explored how process mining helps you optimize your organization’s processes and unlocking Operational Excellence. In this long read, he will get you up to speed.

Process improvement and automation are vital for digital transformation, but identifying which processes to automate and where automation is beneficial can be difficult. Traditional manual methods like interviews and observations are costly and subjective. Process Mining provides a data-driven solution for optimizing processes efficiently and continuously. Process Mining offers precisely that. Let’s examine how Pega brings value through Process Mining.

Optimize and Transform with Pega Process Mining

Process Understanding
By feeding data into Pega Process Mining, it creates a process model that includes all its variations. The number of variations may come as a surprise, including those that should not be possible or strictly forbidden, leading to risks. Pega can mine data from Pega Platform applications out-of-the-box, but you can also use datasets from other systems. Utilizing data from across the organization provides a comprehensive view of all processes. Note that data coming from non BPM/Case management systems may require data cleansing and transformation work, which applies to Process Mining in general.

Process Improvement
Pega Process Mining offers pre-built analyses for reworks, bottlenecks, and slow transitions. It allows clients to identify non-conformities and prioritize optimizations based on business outcomes. The tool becomes more valuable with added contextual data, such as customer category, product, location, and resources, facilitating advanced analyses. AI-driven support identifies root causes and enables validation of future outcomes through what-if scenarios.

Insights from analyses can drive immediate application changes, be converted into stories and fed back into the Pega Platform change backlog, or be transformed into training and coaching activities to drive behavioral change. This exemplifies how Pega Process Mining adds value to a Pega application by tightly connecting the results of Process Mining with the implementation of improvements.

Process Monitoring
You can compare process variations using all case data, opening up many possibilities. For instance, you can easily observe how a process runs in different cities or regions, and determine if your purchase process differs for specific vendors or during certain timeframes. This takes data analysis and visualization to a new level without the need for deep technical knowledge.

One benchmarking example involves comparing the performance of a process before and after making changes (see Figure 1). The average case duration dropped from 7 hours and 37 minutes to 1 hour and 9 minutes. This way you can validate with facts the benefits of process improvement initiatives.

Mitigating risks is another important aspect of monitoring. Process Mining can help identify process variations that are not allowed, such as a four-eye check performed with only two eyes or approvals missing for cases above a certain threshold. With just a few clicks in Process Mining, you can find cases without approvals and determine the individuals involved. It’s not surprising that Process Mining for auditing was one of the first use cases.

Add Task Mining
To gain a comprehensive understanding of their operations, clients require a combination of process mining and task mining capabilities, which cover both automated and manual activities. Task mining focuses on capturing user interactions at the desktop level, recording keystrokes, mouse clicks, application usage, and data entry into fields to document the task process. Pega Workforce Intelligence offers task mining functionalities that perfectly complement Pega Process Mining, enabling clients to analyze how employees effectively accomplish specific manual tasks.

GenAI
During PegaWorld 2023, Pega showcased the integration of GenAI with Process Mining. With the Autopilot you can ask Pega in natural language about performance, bottlenecks, and various other process information, and receive the answer in seconds. It will become available in Pega Infinity 2023, planned for Q3 2023.
Watch PegaWorld 2023 Process Mining presentation and demo

Who should consider Process Mining?
Should you consider using Process Mining for your organization? You might already have many reports available that are hardly used?
Process mining is best suited for analyzing and improving processes that involve a significant amount of structured and digital data. It is particularly effective for processes that generate event logs or transactional data which Pega does by default. Some examples of processes that are well-suited for process mining include:

1. Information Systems:
   Processes executed within an organization’s information systems, such as order processing, claims handling, or invoice processing.
2. Supply Chain Management:
   Processes related to the movement of goods and materials, such as order fulfillment, inventory management, or logistics.
3. Customer Relationship Management:
   Processes involving interactions with customers, such as customer support, complaint handling, or sales processes.
4. Financial Processes:
   Processes related to financial transactions, such as accounts payable/receivable, expense management, or auditing.
5. Healthcare Processes:
   Processes within healthcare organizations, such as patient admission, treatment pathways, or billing.
6. Manufacturing Processes:
   Processes involved in manufacturing goods, such as production planning, quality control, or maintenance.

I once encountered a financial organization that claimed to have only Straight Through Processes (STP), implying that process mining would only reveal the designed process model. However, even in their automated processes, numerous unwanted process variations were discovered through process mining.

Process Mining can give way deeper insights into your process execution than reports can. Reports typically provide predefined views or summaries of the process and may not capture the true process variations. Reports often provide aggregated performance metrics, which may not capture the root causes or specific areas for improvement. While Process mining has the ability to analyze detailed data, provide objective analysis, discover process models, measure performance accurately, and enable root cause analysis.

Good to know: Pega Process Mining is a cloud offering, exclusive to AWS, and can be deployed in any region supported by the AWS cloud.