Process mining is a powerful technique to bring greater transparency to your business operations, improve your processes, and make smarter predictions and decisions. But what is process mining exactly, and how can you transform your SAP S/4HANA deployment with process mining?
What is Process Mining?
Every event that happens within your IT ecosystem should be stored in a log—a digital “footprint” of the activities that occur during the execution of your business processes. However, collecting this information is of little benefit if you don’t examine these event logs to understand what’s actually going on in your system.
Process mining is the use of event log data in order to monitor, analyze, and optimize your business processes. Traditionally, business process management (BPM) has been an involved and highly complex discipline that requires a great deal of human input and investigation. Process mining, on the other hand, bypasses the whiteboards and the spreadsheets and goes directly to the source: your event log data.
Through automated surveying and analysis, process mining can quickly glean the big picture of your business processes while also drilling down into bottlenecks and inefficiencies that need to be corrected. Process mining can be used to great effect for organizations of all sizes and industries, from finance and retail to healthcare and telecommunications.
The Benefits of Process Mining for SAP S/4HANA
SAP S/4HANA is a feature-rich, robust enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that leverages cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics. But with such a powerful system at your fingertips, it can be challenging to harness SAP S/4HANA to fit your business needs.
That’s where process mining comes in. With process mining’s capacity for real-time data processing, you gain insight into how your IT systems truly function. You can then apply this greater understanding throughout the SAP S/4HANA life cycle, from roadmaps and strategic planning to installation, management, and monitoring. The benefits of process mining for SAP S/4HANA include:
- Faster ROI: Process mining gives businesses a faster return on their investment. Organizations can use process mining insights to decrease the length of their planning and implementation cycles and enable smarter, quicker decision-making.
- Greater objectivity: Traditional business process management introduces the risk of human bias and assumptions that don’t accurately depict the reality within your organization. Process mining offers an objective, data-driven, unbiased approach to BPM that helps guide businesses forward.
- Lower business risk: Too many organizations fall victim to IT performance issues and crashes that could have been avoided if they listened to the warning signs. Process mining helps businesses anticipate problems in advance and take steps to lower the risk of a critical failure.
Celonis for SAP S/4HANA Process Mining
Celonis is a Munich-based company that has been one of the pioneers in the field of process mining. As of 2019, Celonis raised $290 million in a Series C funding round and has been valued at $2.5 billion.
SAP and Celonis have a tight partnership and have already collaborated on hundreds of implementations in dozens of countries. According to Celonis, SAP is the most common source system used by its customers.
Celonis first creates a unified process model across your SAP instances and other source systems. The software then creates visualizations of your processes to help measure their performance and uncover the root causes of problems. (Check out this video for an example of how Celonis helps diagnose and resolve issues with financial processes.)
In the long run, Celonis continuously analyzes your business processes to detect changes, uncover hidden patterns, improve its predictions, and make better recommendations. For example, the insights you obtain from Celonis can be used to enact intelligent automation within your business processes. You can use the software to track your progress toward outcomes, as well as intermediate goals, targets, and milestones. This data-driven approach helps you quantify the potential outcomes of a given decision and measure the impact of changes and optimizations.
Conclusion
Process mining is an essential practice for enterprises who want to increase visibility into their business processes, improve their efficiency and productivity, glean better insights, and remain competitive in a constantly shifting business landscape. Implementing process mining is much easier when you have cutting-edge technology like Celonis at hand.
Here at convedo, we’re proud to partner with Celonis, using process mining to help our clients drive change to their business processes. To learn more about the Celonis services that we offer, get in touch with our team today for a chat about your needs and objectives.
