Six Steps For Process Mining Project Success (Pt. 4) — Find Opportunities

This is the last article in our series about how to set up your Process Mining project. In the first three articles we discussed the overall approach, roles, and the first step of developing a Process Mining strategy. Then we discussed the extraction of event logs and the creation of a data model, and in the last article we looked at the creation of a reference process and the analysis of the process itself.

In this article, we discuss the last step of the Process Mining project process — the identification of improvement opportunities based on your analysis.

Step 6: Find opportunities

After the analysis comes the identification of improvement opportunities – even though by now you should have a good understanding where they might lie: your data tells a story and the collaboration with your business representatives give you the necessary context for your recommendations.

The development of recommendations should happen in two steps that go together and allow your decision makers to chose the recommendation that you have prepared for them.

Initial list of recommendations

Capture all areas of improvement in one place and give a high-level benefits calculation for each. This can be high-level and be similar to “if we reduce the number of cases that go down that exception path by 10% [by updating our outdated business rule], we will save x hours of work that will save $y”. You don’t have to get this right to the last cent, but you should have a good estimate of the benefits of that recommendation – either in dollars or a business outcome. Like improving your product production capacity and therefore increasing sales.

Then add additional criteria to this list of implementation-relevant information. Your greatest idea is worth nothing if you cannot realize it. When you do this exercise, it will become clear which are the “high-dollar tickets” on your list. Thereafter, go to your workgroup and present the complete catalog of potential improvement ideas and determine a list of 3–5 recommendations that you want to further detail out for your decision makers.

Create business cases

For each item on your list of to-be-presented improvement recommendations, you have to do two things, so that the decision maker has a clear picture of the context of your recommendation:

• Describe the impact of your recommendation on the levers of the process. Remember the exercise to define what a “good process” looks like? Well, there are a limited number of levers that a process can have and in the graphic below you see some of them (feel free to take them over and add more if needed, like “Caliber” for “Quality” if you want to be cute and continue the list of terms starting with a C – but try to stay below 10 items to not make it too complex for your stakeholders to follow).
  Each improvement opportunity will change the sliders on the graphic, and you need to understand how one change impacts another one. Say, for example, your recommendation is to hire 10 new people for your process. You have figured out via Simulation that you cannot just reassign existing resources and train them – this will increase your cost (negative) but improve your capacity and course of time (positive). However, since you add more individuals, your compliance might go down (negative). Depending on your ideal process profile, this might be good changes that you are willing to make.

• The second thing you need to do is to calculate some form of Return of Investment/ROI for your proposed changes.
  In my example above, you would reduce the time and increase production by 50 pieces of your widget per day. This makes about 12,500 additional widgets that you sell for $500 on top of your current sales number — an increase of $6,250,000, while you pay your 10 resources $80k annually … your potential benefit now is $5,450,000 (6,250M — 800k).
  You can do similar things by calculating saved hours by avoiding rework or exceptions, or any other metric that you find and that makes sense for your process.
• The third item on your business case creation is to list the assumptions, implementation/changes and their cost to the opportunity. This feasibility check is crucial to getting stakeholder buy-in, since they want to know how you intend to bring your idea to live. Will it be a single project, or a multiphase project that has significant dependencies on other projects that your organization is currently going through?
  If your idea takes too much to bring a benefit for your organization in a feasible time, you might want to list your idea a bit further down and bring other, “low-hanging fruit” items to the top of your list.

Presenting to your stakeholders

The final step is to get the buy in from your decision-makers. My recommendation is to set up a formal presentation in which you walk them through what you did and what the scope of your project was. Then describe the highlights of what you found in the analysis (an abstraction of the analysis review presentation that you did earlier in Step 5) and make clear how these findings relate to the decision-makers. This means you most likely will have to simplify your results (and not nerd out) and speak in business terms and not in the terms of the tool.

Then you come to the highlight of your presentation – the improvement opportunities that you have found. Mention that you found more opportunities, but you applied defined criteria for prioritization of them, so you will just present the 3-5 most important opportunities.
Present each of them by listing the three areas above (levers of process, ROI, implementation feasibility) and make it simple for them to follow. If you can, try to give the decision-makers options so that they get the feeling not only to make a black-and-white decision but can add their “stamp” to the future project.

The ideal outcome is that you get a verbal approval for your proposals and can start formalizing the projects per your organization’s process.

Summary

Process Mining can be complex and there are numerous moving parts that you have to align to get to the point that you have actionable improvement opportunities. But is also following a relatively simple process that we look at in the six steps above. If you follow the points in each of the step, and think in iterations instead of a single project, then you will create the momentum that you want for your program.

If you have additional questions or suggestions, don’t be shy to reach out and start a conversation – we are all in the same boat here 🙂