How to Make Process Mining Stick: Key Strategies for Success

Process mining is a powerful tool that can uncover hidden inefficiencies, compliance issues, and improvement opportunities within an organization’s processes. Yet, despite its potential, many process mining initiatives fail to stick, eventually fading out. Why is that?

Marlon Dumas, Chief Product Officer at Apromore & Professor at University of Tartu shares tips and recommendations to ensure your process mining initiatives deliver lasting value.

I recently came across an insightful research paper titled "From Loss of Interest to Denial: A Study on the Terminators of Process Mining Initiatives" by Vinicius Stein Dani, Henrik Leopold, Jan Martijn van der Werf, Iris Beerepoot, and Hajo Reijers⁽¹⁾. The study sheds light on the factors that lead to the termination of process mining projects and offers a roadmap to avoid these pitfalls.

Understanding the Challenges

The research highlights a sequence of events that commonly lead to the demise of process mining initiatives:

1. Initial Enthusiasm Meets Reality: Often, these projects start with great enthusiasm from a few internal champions, supported by external consultants. However, the realization soon dawns that data preparation and analysis require significant effort. This is particularly challenging when tools requiring SQL coding are used, leading to cumbersome interactions between business and IT teams.
2. Loss of Momentum: As external consultants exit, a lack of internal expertise and focus causes process mining insights to come in more slowly. This loss of momentum often results in management losing interest.
3. Internal Politics: Stakeholders may resist findings that expose inefficiencies in their domains. Common excuses include data incompleteness or errors in recording practices. This denial can stall the entire initiative.
4. Failure to Act on Insights: The final nail in the coffin is often the lack of action on the insights gained from process mining. Implementing improvements often requires organizational changes, which can get bogged down in politics, ultimately resulting in a lack of return on investment (ROI).

Recommendations for Success

To ensure that your process mining initiatives deliver lasting value, consider the following strategies:

1. Align Process Mining with Business Teams: Process mining should not be siloed within a data science or IT team. Instead, it should be integrated into the business teams responsible for driving change. When business teams can directly validate hypotheses and act on insights, the gap between identification and action is minimized. A no-code process mining tool, such as Apromore, can empower business users to take ownership of the process.
2. Embrace Iterative Approaches: Avoid overprocessing. Rather than trying to perfect your data processing pipeline or launching large-scale data integration projects from the outset, adopt an iterative approach. Extract just enough data, perform enough analysis to identify value, and then quickly move to implement changes. Iterate between these phases to maintain momentum.
3. Look Beyond the “As-Is”: While understanding the current state of processes is important, it’s equally crucial to forecast the impact of proposed changes. Before implementing process improvements, use data-driven simulation to predict their effects. This proactive approach can prevent the emergence of new bottlenecks and ensure a positive ROI.
4. Integrate Process Mining into a Broader BPM Practice: Process mining is a tool within the broader framework of business process management (BPM). To succeed, it must be part of a strategic alignment with governance, people, and culture. Embedding process mining within a continuous improvement cycle ensures sustained value and organizational buy-in.

These recommendations provide a solid foundation for making process mining initiatives stick. By aligning process mining with business goals, iterating based on actionable insights, and embedding it within a broader BPM strategy, organizations can ensure that process mining delivers long-term value and drives meaningful change.

Conclusion

Process mining has the potential to transform how organizations understand and improve their processes. However, without the right attitudes and strategies, even the most promising initiatives can falter. By focusing on integration with business teams, iterative improvement, proactive simulation, and strategic alignment, organizations can avoid the common pitfalls and make process mining a cornerstone of their operational excellence efforts.

Let’s turn process mining from a fleeting initiative into a lasting source of competitive advantage.

Ready to see how process mining can revolutionize your operations? Request a demo or speak to our team today to explore the possibilities. 

(1) "From Loss of Interest to Denial: A Study on the Terminators of Process Mining Initiatives" by Vinicius Stein Dani, Henrik Leopold, Jan Martijn van der Werf, Iris Beerepoot, and Hajo Reijers.

 

Marlon Dumas

Apromore Chief Product Officer, Co-Founder, and Professor at University of Tartu

 

Marlon is a professor of Information Systems at the University of Tartu. For the past two decades, he’s conducted research and delivered business process management and process mining consultancy. He’s executed R&D projects funded by the European Research Council, the Australian Research Council, the US Army Research Lab, and multinational companies including SAP, Microsoft, and Swedbank. His research has led to 200+ scientific publications, 10 US and EU patents, and a textbook used in 250+ universities. He’s contributed core components of the Apromore product since 2011.