QPR Software Process Mining for Process Improvement Guide

Achieve process excellence with data-driven process improvement

QPR SoftwareProcess Mining for Process Improvement

E-mail: marketing@qpr.com Web: www.qpr.com

OF PROCESS IMPROVEMENT WITH PROCESS MININGBenefits

Discover your PROCESSES

UncoverROOT CAUSES

ImplementCHANGES

MonitorCONTINUOUSLY

Discover your as-is processes, their inefficiencies, and compliance issues.

Find root causes for problems and efficiently allocate development resources accordingly.

Reduce symptoms of waste: Effectively implement the most profitable changes and set up related metrics.

Set up continuous process monitoring using process insight and utilize predictive machine learning.

BENEFITS

Increased efficiency, sales revenue, and customer satisfaction are a few of the benefits our customers have realized from using process mining in their process improvement activities.

For instance, Metsä Board succeeded to increase order lines and volume by 60% without changes in their supply chain headcount as well as increase the number of conformant order lines from 40% to 80% - by focusing process improvement activities to the right areas.

“We were immediately able to focus our process improvement activities to the right things to reach the results our business needed - and not wasting time on trial and error.” says VP of Supply Chain Matti Ketonen. Read more here.

Process Mining is a great method for continuous Process Improvement. In this guide, you'll see how QPR ProcessAnalyzer - QPR's process mining software - can be utilized for continuous process improvement and Business Process Management (BPM).

The ability to discover your as-is processes is at the core of process mining. QPR ProcessAnalyzer collects data from your source systems (such as ERP, BPM, CRM)and automatically visualizes process flows that take place in your organization.

Find out how to quickly identify bottlenecks, rework, and other symptoms of inefficient processes. Moreover, learn how the PDCA method can be applied to process mining and see how you can use process benchmarking, conformance and root cause analysis, as well as ready-made KPI dashboards to get instant and lasting results with QPR ProcessAnalyzer.

ImproveDARE TO

In order to improve your business, it is important that you gain a holistic view of your business operations and identify problems that are limiting your performance.

All organizations in the world have some kinds of challenges - either within their own operations or in the external environment. From an internal perspective, one of the biggest challenges that organizations are now facing is digitalization - how to use digital platforms to make processes more efficient.

Traditionally, in process management, the lack of connections between enterprise information systems and business processes has required organizations to perform laborious manual steps to gather data about daily process performance. QPR ProcessAnalyzer's built-in connectors seamlessly collect and integrate data, enabling visualization of your as-is processes and advanced analytics on data from your systems.

"In business process reengineering, organizations are primarily interested in an improved 'to be' process, so often they have little interest in exploring 'as is', or how the process is currently performed. But understanding the current process is critical to knowing whether it is worth investing in improvements, where performance problems exist, and how much variation there is in the process across the organization. As a result, some companies tend to either skip current process analysis altogether, adopt shortcuts to it, or pay consultants a lot of money to analyze the “as is” process." -HBR

PictureTHE BIG

PLAN - DO - CHECK - ACT PDCA

BENEFITS

lan The starting point in process improvement is to discover your organization's problems and thereafter identify their root causes - what is causing the issues. Only once your are done discovering your processes and their root causes should you start planning the improvement. This is where process mining software proves to be a powerful tool, as it can quickly discover your as-is processes, their inefficiencies and root causes based on your own data - event logs. After implementing process mining, you'll quickly get a complete X-ray of the processes based on your own systems and gain the confidence to make important and necessary decisions based on this fact-based data.

o: This part happens outside of process mining. After process mining gives you an in-depth understanding of your own processes, problems, and root causes, you'll have a good idea about what you need to change. The outcome of the operational development change will then be visible in your transactional system data, such as the ERP, CRM, and Financial systems.

heck: Now is the time for you to study the results that your changes bring about, and see what is working and what is not. Process mining is able to pick up these changes in the end-to-end processes and continue monitoring them for you, in contrast to traditional analytics, which are hard-coded and won't follow new changes in your process. Process mining helps you to verify if the changes are working as intended, and how much value is added to your process.

ct: If the changes that you made in the "Do"-step work successfully, you should then standardize the solution for your business. It's important to ensure the solution is implemented, standardized, taken into use, and that it will continue to stay in use. In other words, you should continuously monitor your processes in order to timely react to future problems. Process mining is used to monitor the whole end-to-end process, confirming that the process improvement works as intended, while also identifying the new most important problems limiting performance.

P

DC

A

One way to support continuous business improvement is using the iterative PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) approach - also known as the Deming Cycle. By systematically testing different solutions, assessing the outcomes, and implementing the ones that work the best, you can improve the quality of your business remarkably.

The ability to discover the fact-based, as-is processes is at the core of successful process improvement. Process benchmarking is one way to discover your as-is processes.

Process benchmarking offers several benefits to companies seeking better operational performance, including:

1. Understanding your current processes and starting point as you consider potential change initiatives.

2. Seeing how your organization rates in operational performance compared to different areas: process benchmarking highlights the areas that have the best potential for short-term and long-term process improvement.

3. Yielding factual data that is crucial for justifying a resource request or building a powerful business case for process improvement initiatives.

QPR ProcessAnalyzer provides you with superior tools for benchmarking your as-is processes by any dimension meaningful for your organization - e.g. region, unit, or cost.

The picture below shows a benchmark of business in the Chicago region compared to the other regions. The Flowchart in the left window shows that, for example, 22 % of cases in Chicago experience Delivery Changed activities - compared to only 1 % of cases outside Chicago. The table in right window shows that while 15 % of all cases belong to the Chicago region, 42% of those cases where Account Manager is Mary Wilson belong to Chicago.

In this example, you gain a good understanding of Chicago compared to your other regions. By noticing that delivery is changed much more often in Chicago compared to other regions, you've identified your first improvement area.

PROCESS

BenchmarkingQPR PROCESSANALYZER

Benchmarking analysis

The conformance analysis is one of the most advanced analyses in the BPM area, as you instantly spot process violations. QPR ProcessAnalyzer compares your as-is processes to your designed processes - the Design Model - and instantly presents conforming and nonconforming cases, conformance trends, reasons for deviations, and top violating variations.

With QPR ProcessAnalyzer's Conformance analysis, you can easily edit the Design Model and the software will automatically update the analysis to check conformance with the new model. Moreover, you can check the best process variations and simply "auto create design model" based on these best versions.

With one click, you'll further see the Root Causes for the violations - the influencing factors behind the problems.

QPR PROCESSANALYZER

Conformance AnalysisPROCESS

ComplianceOrganizations strive to plan their processes according to the agreed policies, taking into account the stakeholder and regulatory requirements, in order to reduce risk.

However, in reality, process execution rarely goes according to plan.

Process mining helps you detect process violations for various purposes: • Detect compliance issues

• For example, in processes within procurement, accounts payable, and accounts receivable

• Highlight deviations from accounting standards• Identify Segregation of Duties (SoD) conflicts

• E.g. in Order-to-Cash (O2C) or Purchase-to-Pay (P2P)

QPR ProcessAnalyzer contains the whole package: Business Intelligence, reporting, and analysis features, which enable you to clearly communicate process mining results to all process mining stakeholders: the management team, process owners, process participants, system engineers, etc.

1. Key performance indicator (KPI) charts can be selected from a variety of ready-made presets. These charts can easily be customized by any type of user.

2. Detailed custom KPIs are easy to create with the powerful expression language.3. All KPIs and charts can then be added to fully customizable dashboards, like the

ones you see below.

In the words of our customer Terumo Europe: “You build something that's a complete x-ray of the processes, and you can bring those facts to the table without debates."

QPR PROCESSANALYZER

DashboardsPROCESS PERFORMANCE

MonitoringMonitoring process performance with QPR ProcessAnalyzer is easy. You can monitor key performance indicators regarding, for instance, time, cost, and quality. We recommend using the three following KPIs: Happy Customer, Happy Flow, and Happy Automation. These can applied for both individual steps and the whole end-to-end process. When all three steps have been reached, you can achieve process excellence.

This framework of process excellence can be used to improve all of the processes in your business.

1. The Happy Customer KPIs means keeping your promises to customers to ensure high customer satisfaction. For example, after customers make purchases with your organization, they should receive their order on time and in full.

2. The Happy Flow KPIs assure that organizations follow the agreed process - in order to accomplish internal efficiency. For example, although you would manage to send the order to your customer on time and in full, but you need to use an unusual and expensive way of delivery to do this, your internal efficiency suffers. Examples of the happy flow are first time right and lead time KPIs.

3. The Happy Automation KPIs monitor your process automation progress.

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QPR Software Plc (Nasdaq Helsinki) provides process mining, performance management and enterprise architecture solutions for digital transformation, strategy execution and business

process improvement in over 50 countries. QPR software allows customers to gain valuable insights for informed decisions that make a difference. Dare to improve.

About QPR

Process Improvement webinar • Process Benchmarking• Conformance Analysis • Process reporting

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Book an interactive online demo with one of our process mining experts through this link.

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QPR ProcessAnalyzer Recognitions• Forrester Now Tech for Process Mining 2020• Gartner Market Guide Process Mining 2019• Gartner Market Guide for DTOs 2020