Process Discovery and Conformance Checking with Process Mining to Enable RPA Strategy

This blog is part of our guest blog series with our partners, myInvenio and BP3. This is the first blog from Jacopo Cecchi, VP Marketing at myInvenio.

Business processes often involve multiple stakeholders performing different parts of the process and relying on multiple applications and siloed information systems to run them. This fragmentation of people and information systems involved translates into a lack of visibility on the end-to-end process, which ultimately makes it difficult to understand how processes actually run and to check whether they are in compliance with their expected behavior.

Traditional Approaches to Business Process Design

Traditional approaches to business process design and modelling rely on qualitative and subjective data – such as interviews and questionnaires – to map and analyze current state business processes and involve, often, expensive consulting services. Process audit common practices also rely on limited data – e.g. audit sampling – to assess process compliance. As a result, traditional approaches to process discovery and conformance checking are suboptimal and expensive.

Process mining provides a new bottom-up, transactional data-driven approach to business process discovery and conformance checking that overcomes the limits of the aforementioned traditional approaches. Mining the event logs data stored in the information systems used by the process’ stakeholders, process mining allows you to automatically generate a dynamic model of the As-Is process that is objective and comprehensive of all process variants. Not only the model has no observer’s bias, it also takes less time to be created and is less expensive.

Advanced Process Mining Solution

The more advanced the process mining solution used, the more accurate the dynamic model of the process that can be achieved and the analysis that can be performed. myInvenio leads innovation in the field, being able to mine process decision rules – e.g. in an accounts payable process myInvenio can infer automatically that above a certain amount an invoice requires some approval activities – and being able to map processes with many to many relationships in a single comprehensive process. The latter capability, referred to as Multi-Level Process Mining, allows you to analyze complex processes such as Procure to Pay or Order to Cash while treating them as single end-to-end processes without having to deal with biased statistics, data divergence and convergence issues. Without Multi-Level Process Mining, P2P subprocesses – purchasing, ordering, invoicing, payment – would have to be analyzed independently, losing visibility on the end-to-end P2P process.

AI-Is Process Model

The As-Is process model discovered with mining enables you to analyze the process along different dimensions, which include control flow, time, costs, resources involved, and process instances. These analyses support process improvement initiatives. They provide unprecedented fine grained visibility on the end-to-end process for its assessment.

A second important application of process mining is to monitor the conformance of the actual process against its reference model. Developing a model on BPM solutions like iGrafx empowers business and regulatory compliance monitoring by automatically identifying discrepancies between the intended and actual process flow. This is especially true for real-time compliance monitoring.

How Process Mining Enables RPA Strategy

Given the discovery and conformance checking capabilities, it is easy to understand how process mining enables an RPA strategy:

• Before implementing RPA, process mining helps to discover the process and uncover redundancies and inefficiencies. It also detects non-compliant activities and process path variants. It identifies RPA’ s best candidate activities and support the standardization of process path variants. Few solutions like myInvenio go beyond current state process assessment. It provides the capability to simulate RPA’s impact on process behavior and ROI. It does this by performing accurate what-if scenarios analyses that minimize adoption risks.
• Once RPA has been deployed, process mining helps monitor process performance and RPA’s ROI. It does this in real time to ensure that RPA is working as expected. Process mining plays a key role in automatically generating process and RPA documentation. Use these in repositories such as iGrafx’ for governance, risk and compliance purposes.

There’s an increase for customers’ demand for tools to enable RPA strategy and to monitor process and RPA’s compliance. MyInvenio and iGrafx are developing integration between their two solutions. They seamlessly integrate mined data into iGrafx and augment iGrafx’ GRC capabilities. These capabilities are now available as part of iGrafx’ RPA Accelerator offering. Find the description here.