Technology Offering
PROCESS MINING
Service line
Digital Transformation
Syngroup Office
Vienna / Austria
Geography
Europe
PROCESS MINING
Background
Process Mining, also known as Automated Business Process Discovery is a technology which enables organisations to quickly analyse and visualise how a process is performing in reality.
  • Historically, process improvement relied on a combination of process mapping, post-it notes, interviews with process owners and other stakeholders. All in all, this amounted to a great deal of manual effort and the results of the subsequent ‘analysis’ could be hit-or-miss.
  • Because Process Mining utilises real data, the outcome of the analysis is fact based. In addition, powerful visualisation adds to the understanding of what is happening deep inside the process. The visualisation aspect allows problem areas to be identified and prioritised very quickly, which means that process improvements can be targeted where they will realise the greatest benefits.
How it works
  • All information Systems (IS) such as SAP, ORACLE etc generate EVENT LOGS. These logs contain an array of information such as transaction ID, user ID and timestamps.
  • Event logs can be analysed to determine the progress (time and routing) of each ‘transaction’ through the system
  • By aggregating event data over a selected period, the flow and routing of transactions can be visualised to build a rich-picture of how transactions actually move through a process.
  • Filters can be applied to a visualisation to include or remove certain transaction types and other criteria can be added.
  • Results can often show a very different picture of the passage of transactions through a system to the one that is believed to be the case.
Results
Order Confirmation time reduced by 86%
Use Case
  • Our client is a global manufacturer of packaging products, recognised and respected for their innovative approach to continuous improvement.
  • Lead-times are crucial to customers and therefore understanding the progress of orders through the system became a focus of interest to our client.
  • After some initial discussions, it was agreed that data- mining would be the perfect ‘tool’ to provide the answers our client was looking for.
  • The necessary software was installed and data collected for several weeks. During this period, the visualisation module was developed and configured. This included the necessary filters to enable our client to include or exclude various attributes, including SKUs, date ranges, customers etc
  • Following a period of testing and proving, the software was implemented. It has now been integrated into our client’s process improvement methodology.
Typical project tasks
Analyse Event-Logs and discover the actual process across a number of sites.
Consolidate, learn und extract best practices.
Define and communicate the new target process.
Set SMART targets for process KPIs such as cycle time.
Periodically monitor and review process compliance.
Process Mining can also be used to support Value Stream Analysis and it’s drill-down capability enables analysis of single orders to identify causes of delays and bottlenecks.