Apromore has released the latest version of its process mining product with new capabilities to help customers navigate ongoing change by enabling them to increase the speed and accuracy of simulating the impact of process changes.
Organizations continue to experience significant disruption from the effects of the pandemic, supply chain disruptions, the conflict in Ukraine, and the digitization of business processes. To respond to these changes, operations, product, and service teams must improve their decision intelligence capabilities by analyzing their current processes and identifying opportunities for process re-engineering and improvement, including the potential for automation.
As a result, organizations are using process mining to accelerate the time needed to identify and document existing processes. Unlike other process mining software, Apromore now includes roundtrip simulation capabilities: customers can automatically discover a full simulation model from an event log in a couple of clicks. When saving the discovered BPMN model, they can select to include simulation parameters extracted from the same event log, which capture the “as-is” process. The saved model is ready for “what-if” analysis: users can modify the parameters (e.g. changing the arrival rate to simulate an increase in demand) or the structure of the process model (e.g. removing a check or re-sequentializing activities) and assess the impact of these what-if scenarios on a range of process measures such as cycle time, process costs and resource utilization, via off-the-shelf, customizable dashboards.
These capabilities dramatically reduce the time needed to perform simulations. They also improve the accuracy of data and abstract complexity so that more users have access to advanced tools to conduct critical business analysis. For example, large businesses typically have more than 100 activities per process to analyze, each with several attributes. Manually completing the data entry would take many days if not weeks to finish. Apromore can now extract the simulation parameters with the press of a button.
A demonstration of this capability is shown in a video here.
Apromore’s latest update builds on its existing business process simulation capabilities based on the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). This open standard for process modeling provides a consistent, understandable and straightforward framework for business process models that helps users to understand even complex business processes quickly. Apromore exploits the BPMN extension mechanism to incorporate simulation parameters, so that these BPMN models remain self-contained and can be exchanged between tools.
Recently, a financial services organization analyzed how several of its large lending teams queue resources to uncover utilization issues. The company used simulation to, within hours, identify how changes to processes could impact service level agreements and improve efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Process Mining for Digital Twins Simulation
Organizations are increasingly building digital twin models to understand the complex inter-relationships of processes and how various scenarios impact results. Digital Twins often combine different process groups that include many different applications to understand dependencies and what changes might be possible for process improvement. Apromore can help teams easily analyze several hundred activities, each with simulation parameters.
Other Apromore 8.3 updates include:
- Cost overlay. You can now define a cost center by assigning a cost per time unit (e.g. hourly) to each role in an event log. Once you have defined a cost center, you can overlay cost information on a process map or a BPMN model to visualize the cost distribution across activities.
- Enhanced dashboard options. The dashboard editor now offers a wider choice of chart types, including heat maps, bubble charts, scatter plots, and tree maps, with the ability to plot any performance measure or attribute in each of the axes of a chart.
- Enhanced conformance checking statistics. The conformance checker now displays a wider range of statistics for non-conformant case variants to help you investigate the root causes of non-conformance.
- Customizable roles. As an administrator, you now have an option to create custom roles and to define visibility rules and permissions for each role, to match your corporate requirements.
- Bulk export/import. Ability to export and import files, filter templates and dashboard templates in bulk (e.g. download multiple files).
- Enhancements to model editor: Ability to attach comments and properties to the elements of a BPMN model (in the model editor). Auto-saving in the model editor.
Because business processes often span multiple systems, an application-neutral approach means that analysts and business decision-makers can use a single system to gain a complete picture of business processes and their performance.
In addition to a proof of concept to gauge the value of switching process mining tools, Apromore Migration Support eases the burden of rebuilding dashboards, connectors, filters and other assets when switching to a new process mining solution.