Jorge León - Mática Partners
April 18th, 2023
Imagine that your everyday routine is to wake up, have coffee, brush your teeth, take a shower, get dressed, grab your keys, and leave the house. Now, imagine millions of people with different routines than yours and different from each other. Where would you start to analyze them to obtain behavior patterns, similarities, or any information you need?
Process Mining is the solution to this type of problem that, when applied to the business world, directly affects strategic decision-making and, therefore, its costs and revenues.
Process Mining is often perceived as a difficult process to understand. However, understanding this discipline is not as difficult as it seems, and it provides significant advantages for organizations. We'll tell you about them in this article.
What is Process Mining? Dealing with initial obstacles
Process Mining is a discipline that combines data mining concepts, business processes, and information systems with the aim of improving efficiency, reducing costs, improving quality, and increasing transparency in business processes.
To implement this process and ensure that the results obtained are accurate and reliable, data quality is crucial. However, this is a recurring problem that arises in the initial stages of implementation. This is because the data recorded in information systems may be incomplete, inconsistent, and contain errors, which negatively affects the results obtained.
Another common obstacle when performing Process Mining is the lack of standardization in data. Sometimes, the data recorded in information systems is in different formats, making it difficult to integrate, analyze, and obtain accurate results. In addition, organizations often have many different processes, and it may be difficult to identify which ones are relevant to analyze.
Once these initial hurdles are overcome, how is this process carried out? What phases are involved, and what benefits does it bring in each one?
Data preprocessing
To perform Process Mining correctly, it is necessary to carry out a data preprocessing phase that allows us to normalize and clean all this information. This first phase requires systems designed to process large volumes of data. To do this, at Mática, we use AWS, which is a public cloud platform that has a series of ideal services to perform all the necessary actions, sometimes even without code.
This phase is divided into 4 stages:
Data ingestion: where the necessary data for analysis is obtained, even from SaaS systems, using an AWS No-Code service.
Data Quality: where the quality of the data is analyzed, and those that do not meet certain quality rules are eliminated. To do this, Mática has its own product, Aqtiva, which allows rules to be created, validated, and deployed on the AWS platform easily and efficiently.
Transformation: data is prepared for visualization, normalizing and joining information from different sources. AWS provides Low-Code services to address this phase without provisioning.
Storage and Service: information is stored definitively and made accessible to internal or external tools through AWS DataLake construction services.
In general, preprocessing is a critical step in Process Mining, as it allows for clean and consistent data to ensure accurate and reliable results. Once we have completed this step, we move on to the final phase.
Final phase
In the final phase of Process Mining analysis, the actual process mining is carried out. There are several solutions on the market that adapt to the client's needs. Among them, Celonis stands out, the best-known Process Mining tool that provides great analysis and automatically generates the necessary metrics to understand and analyze business flows.
Another option is Power BI, the BI tool from the Office package that has multiple visualizations to generate the necessary metrics and third-party paid applications to paint the flows and visualize any problems. Recently, it also incorporated a Process Mining tool called Process Advisor through Power Automate. Tableau is a very similar alternative to Power BI, which can be used if you don't have Windows to develop with Power BI and also has third-party applications for this purpose.
There are various tools and solutions in the market to perform Process Mining, and all of them have the ability to connect with AWS. This connectivity capability allows for greater efficiency in process analysis and facilitates the identification of areas for improvement and opportunities to optimize business efficiency.
Why do you need to apply Process Mining in your company?
Basically, to be able to...
Detect bottlenecks in processes
Detect non-compliance with established processes
Extract measurements such as average, maximum, and minimum task times
Detect blocked processes
Establish average, maximum, and minimum time to complete the entire Flow.
Do you want to control the processes in your business and be able to get the most out of the data they generate?
With the tools and services from AWS and Matica, you can apply Process Mining in your organization to obtain the key data that will help you improve your business processes. With our team of experts, it won't matter how many millions of routines you have to analyze, you'll know where to start and have a clear idea of what information to collect and analyze to make successful decisions.