What are the benefits of process mining and process discovery?

I had not thought about process mining and process discovery, but we were able to surface a lot when we put in a new ERP a number of years ago. The new ERP replaced a custom-developed tool that they'd used for almost 20 years. We learned something interesting through that implementation because we were able to sit down with departments for the first time and say, "We have a lot of idiosyncrasies and there are things that we do that we just don't need to do. But now we can quantify how much those idiosyncrasies cost because the consultants will tell us how much it would cost to customize an application, or to change the one we're buying to do that." That was eye opening to folks. Then we could say, "We could do that, but it will take 80 hours of consultant time to program that for you. Is it worth it?" And it was a good conversation.

I've been involved in a lot of conversations around process mining and process discovery. I’m involved with a group of Fortune 500 companies that have large-scale automation programs. We have a leadership council in automation that meets on a quarterly basis, and none of the folks on this council are satisfied with the current state of the art.

There's universal agreement on the council that getting people in a room to ask them how they do something is a waste of time, because they either lie intentionally or unintentionally. They tell you what they think you want to know and will probably deny evidence that they do certain things. All the people on this council say, "I'm tired of going into a conference room with subject matter experts who are trying to convince me that they do something a certain way when I have real evidence that they don't."

Historically there's one set of tools that look at application logs and how applications are exercised in the course of a business process. And then there are others that effectively look at the user interface and seek to emulate the steps that people take in a business process. Obviously these tools can be used in an automation initiative, but they have tremendous value for standardizing processes as well. Finance organizations have used some process discovery tools just to standardize a process that may occur across the quarterly close or something like that. It's a very interesting space. It is sometimes conflated with the business process automation (BPA) tools, and there's overlap for sure, but there's a lot of standalone value in having these capabilities available.