What is Process Mining?

Process mining is a data-driven technique for discovering, monitoring, and improving real business processes by analyzing event logs from your systems. Unlike traditional process analysis based on interviews or assumptions, process mining reveals how your processes actually work.

Understanding Process Mining

Every time something happens in your business—a loan application is submitted, an order is shipped, a customer call is answered—your systems record an event. Process mining analyzes these events to automatically discover and visualize your actual process flows.

Think of it as an X-ray for your business operations: it shows you what's really happening, not what people think is happening.

Why Not Just Ask People?

Traditional process analysis relies on interviews and documentation:

Traditional approach:
1. Interview stakeholders about "how things work"
2. Manually create process diagrams based on descriptions
3. Validate with more interviews
4. Update documentation when processes change

The problems:

• Based on subjective perceptions, not reality
• Time-consuming and expensive
• Quickly becomes outdated
• Misses exceptions and edge cases

Process mining is different:

Process mining approach:
1. Export event logs from existing systems
2. Automatically discover actual process flows
3. See real performance metrics (durations, frequencies)
4. Identify deviations and bottlenecks
5. Continuously monitor with live data

The benefits:

• Based on objective data, not opinions
• Fast and automated
• Always current with latest data
• Captures all variations and exceptions
• Includes actual timing and performance data

Process Mining Fundamentals

This is part of a 4-part introduction to process mining:

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