Research reveals damage to business performance when companies lack insight into their processes

The study found that business leaders are turning to process mining to deliver data and uncover insights about how their business operates. These insights are helping them to understand and improve the execution of a complex web of processes that power their company. These include supply chain and customer service processes that function across a vast range of systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning, Supply Chain Management, Information Technology Service Management, spreadsheets and more.

The findings also show a range of business issues that are created when companies lack insights into how their processes are executing including increased cost, decreased efficiency, missed new business opportunities, lower productivity, high employee turnover rates, missed KPIs, loss of revenue, lower customer and employee satisfaction as well as loss of strategic vision.

“Process inefficiencies are the silent killers in businesses, that are hidden in old systems, and can’t be seen without process mining,” said Wil van der Aalst, Chief Scientist at Celonis. “When process inefficiencies are seen and fixed, not only does business performance increase but so does flexibility to act in response to new opportunities as they arise, such as COVID-19 pandemic business disruptions, increasing sustainability and cost savings and efficiencies in response to the demands of inflation.”

The study captures insights from more than 800 decision-makers at companies worldwide.

Key Findings include:

61% of decision-makers will use, or are evaluating, process mining in the next 12 months, ranking it the top technology they plan to use to measure or improve their business processes.

71% of businesses use ten or more applications to execute a single process and 72% still use manual methods that limit process visibility.

90% of businesses that use process mining technology are confident they’ll hit their process improvement targets this year.

Only 16% of businesses say they have complete visibility into their processes and just 7% report complete, real-time process visibility.

Organisations are Failing to Optimize Processes, Losing Out on Key Opportunities

Organisations have historically struggled to develop, document and track processes, but on top of this, companies now wrestle with macroeconomic challenges such as inflation, supply chain disruptions and hybrid system environments, making process visibility even more critical now.

Only 56% of decision-makers feel they’re able to incorporate all systems involved into their department’s processes to create an end-to-end view of those processes.

Almost half of the survey participants, 44%, said they are spending more due to lack of process insights. 28% of North America respondents are feeling the impact of lower customer satisfaction from process issues compared to their EMEA counterparts, 25%.

Elusive Real-Time Data Hampers Execution

The next phase of transforming business processes is moving from complete process visibility to complete real-time process visibility. In the modern consumer experience, reactingin real-time is table-stakes – imagine if Uber took more than a day to process requests. Why should business processes be different?

The lack of real-time data adoption by businesses to improve process visibility shows:

53% of businesses report using process visibility data that is more than one day old

28% of businesses report using process visibility data that is greater than 10 minutes old and less than one day old

12% of businesses report using process visibility data that is greater than one minute but less than 10 minutes old

Based on the findings of Forrester’s research, Celonis makes the following recommendations to improve productivity (and therefore save resources and provide a better customer experience):

Identify processes to track and baseline before assessing which to improve, or automate: It’s crucial that businesses first know their processes, intimately, before triaging and changing plans for improvements. A helpful mantra to remember is “understand, reengineer, and automate processes” - in this order.

Invest in process skills: Most companies are structured by functions, not processes. To improve processes, leaders must emphasize an end-to-end process mindset - not functions. Business process owner roles, hardly ever found in an organisation, must exist and be influential.

Task mining, in tandem with process mining, enables companies to gain additional insight into how their processes actually work. This provides the full picture of process weak points and employee pain points from the applications they’re using along a process. Process mining and task-mining combined can provide a full picture.

The true value of process mining comes with cross-system discovery: Processes covered by a single system (such as ERP, SCM or CRM) tend to benefit less from process mining than those that span a multitude of systems. Process mining initiatives should focus on the multi-system use cases for high return from their process mining investments.