What is Process Mining?

Process Mining is a data-driven analysis method that reconstructs and visualizes real business processes based on the digital traces left in IT systems such as ERP, CRM, or ticketing tools. It reveals how processes actually run – as opposed to how they were planned or documented. This makes bottlenecks, deviations, and optimization potential visible in an objective, fact-based way.

Why does this matter?

Companies often rely on assumptions about their processes that rarely match reality. Process Mining provides a fact-based foundation for decisions, reduces costs by uncovering inefficiencies, and forms the basis for automation and continuous improvement.

What does this look like in practice?

In a purchase-to-pay process the traces sit in SAP: purchase order created, goods receipt booked, invoice recorded, payment approved. Process mining reads those timestamps per case and assembles them into the paths that actually occurred. What surfaces is, for instance, that 12% of invoices arrive before the goods receipt and then sit idle for six days on average — a pattern no process diagram contains.

Not to be confused with

Not to be confused with task mining, which records clicks and keystrokes at the desktop, whereas process mining reads events from the business systems. Nor with business intelligence: a BI dashboard shows metrics at a point in time, while process mining reconstructs the sequence of steps that produced them.