Intelligent automation makes quick work of your business activities by powering processes with digital workers. But do you know which processes should actually be automated?

Even if you’ve spent years analyzing operations and tweaking how your business operates, your organization is constantly changing. Luckily, there are a few ways you might tackle this evolving challenge.

Most companies keep their process improvement teams busy analyzing and updating their automation manually. Smarter companies use software to monitor and improve processes automatically as they evolve.

Process Mining in a Nutshell

If your work touches on topics like digital transformation projects or process improvement, you’re probably familiar with process mining tools. These tools use data analytics to analyze digital footprints and reconstruct core business processes. They help you discover, monitor, and improve your processes — providing fact-based insights into your as-is processes and identifying potential process bottlenecks.

Within this realm of process mining also stands an important concept: conformance checks. As process mining delves into your process models and event logs, conformance checks analyze the differences and alignments between the actual process execution versus its intended execution.

By leveraging process mining software, your enterprise can effectively visualize workflows, enable data-driven business process management (BPM), and facilitate continuous process improvement.

Sounds like a dream, right? Well, the more intricate part of the process mining journey is figuring out how to get the most value out of it. We’ve pulled in some diverse process mining case studies and use cases to give you a taste of how process mining can be used in an industry like yours. 

Process Mining for Healthcare

The healthcare industry is full of complex process steps and high volumes of patient data. Providers and payers alike can leverage process mining to optimize patient care and streamline administrative processes. Process mining can help healthcare providers analyze patient journeys, identify inefficiencies in treatment processes, and optimize resource allocation in real-time.

Think about patient flow management. Coordinating the movement of patients through various healthcare processes, from admission to discharge, includes multiple potential process variants. Process mining techniques allow hospitals and clinics to analyze data from patient flow and identify delays and other inefficiencies that result in longer wait times or inadequate care quality.

Process mining also has tremendous potential to transform clinical operations. The path from patient diagnosis to treatment and follow-up care includes scheduling appointments and managing medications or procedures. Process bottlenecks in this path could have life-or-death consequences. As a result of using process mining as a business transformation initiative, hospitals can enhance patient satisfaction, reduce wait times, and improve overall operational efficiency.

Healthcare process mining in action

One large hospital system has integrated process and task mining to identify over $5 million they could save by avoiding duplicate insurance verifications. On top of that, their compliance rate with accurate data collection increased from 40% to 87%.

Process Mining for Supply Chain and Manufacturing

Manufacturing companies can benefit significantly from implementing process mining projects. Process mining enables them to identify inefficiencies and waste within production processes, reduce downtime, and improve product quality.

Supply chain management is particularly valuable in manufacturing. Supply chain management spans both complex internal steps and external vendor components. A business analyst can apply process mining to identify areas where bottlenecks occur. This includes finding where inventory is overstocked or understocked and where communication breakdowns may happen. Process mining can optimize entire purchase-to-pay processes, analyzing throughput time and streamlining invoice processes for smoother operations.

Another area where process mining can be helpful is in the manufacturing process itself. From raw material acquisition to finished product assembly, companies can identify delays in production or issues with quality control. This allows companies to improve their production processes, reduce costs, and improve the quality of their products.

Forecasting is another one of the benefits of process mining within manufacturing applications. By monitoring data from SCADA, IoT, and maintenance systems, manufacturers can begin to predict when machinery will likely need repairs or replacement, and then preemptively order the right components. With this data-driven insight in hand, the enterprise can minimize downtime while limiting the number of spare parts kept in stock.

Process Mining for Insurance

Process mining can be beneficial in several key areas for insurance. First, think about claims processing. This complex process includes many steps, from initial claim submission to final payment. By using process mining techniques, insurers can identify bottlenecks in the claims process, such as delays in document processing or communication breakdowns between departments. This allows them to streamline the process and reduce the time it takes to process claims, improving customer experiences and cost reductions.

Insurers can also benefit tremendously from process mining for fraud detection. By using process mining techniques to analyze claims data, analysts can identify patterns and anomalies that may indicate fraudulent activity, allowing them to take action to prevent or investigate potential fraud.

Insurance process mining in action

The Uniqa Insurance Group AG processes over 200,000 transactions per month with digital workers. They’ve been using process mining for over two years to “make decisions based on facts rather than on feelings,” and with SS&C | Blue Prism® Process Intelligence (BPPI), they’ve seen a 99.5% success rate.

By analyzing data generated during policy administration and underwriting, insurers like the Uniqa Insurance Group AG can identify inefficiencies and automation opportunities. In the end, they provide better customer service at reduced costs.

Process Mining for Banking and Financial Services

One key area where process mining can be useful for banks and financial services is to identify compliance issues related to regulatory standards. As recent bank failures show, regulations have an important role to play, but ensuring compliance with these regulations can be a complex and time-consuming process.

By using process discovery techniques to analyze existing compliance issue data, companies can identify other common issues, like delays in processing regulatory filings or inconsistencies in accounts payable reports. This allows them to take action to address them and ensure ongoing compliance with regulatory requirements.

Another financial business process worth tackling with process mining is risk management. Banks and financial institutions must constantly assess and manage credit, market and operational risk. Companies can identify areas where risks may be undermanaged or overmanaged, allowing them to take action to mitigate these risks and improve their overall risk management practices.

Banking and finance process mining in action

One example of this comes from a Fortune 100 financial services firm, which needed to monitor investor onboarding to ensure they complied with regulations. The previous process relied on 16 full-time employees, yet they could only monitor 15% of the overall process. The key performance indicators illustrate a huge impact — process mining helped them build a process monitoring 100% of transactions with only three full-time employees, saving the firm $2 million annually.

Even the fundamental principles of financial operations provide optimization opportunities.

Process Mining for Telecommunications

Telecommunications companies manage a massive physical and digital footprint, such as cables and satellites that transmit signals across oceans and continents. Teams also manage several tasks, such as resolving billing disputes and processing payments. So much business activity attracts plenty of inefficiencies and room for human error. Thus, business process analysis through means like process mining is an ideal solution to help identify and prevent issues before they arise or become more challenging to tackle.

Telecommunications process mining in action

One international communications vendor used process mining to save nearly $8 million per year. They identified nine solution areas, including multiple opportunities for improvement of their process automation, virtual agents, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) operations.

Whereas many companies still use their people to create process flow diagrams of manual steps, the application of process mining software takes the telecommunications industry further with fewer resources.

Wrapping it up

Process mining has specific and generic uses across every industry. As people conduct business in spaces like hospitality and retail, process mining offers up valuable data that are sometimes hidden in plain sight.

An organization that understands how its actual processes are working can predict where it's headed or even find better ways of doing work. As such, process deviations are identified and fixed.

SS&C Blue Prism takes this capability even further by combining both process and task mining into one product, Process Intelligence, ensuring the end-to-end journeys of key business processes are monitored and mapped. The future of process mining opens even more potential for companies to transform their operations.