The process has been worked out and digitized, data acquisition is already in place for the majority of production steps, and process and quality managers are satisfied. Now data analysts are starting to check the processes for compliance, throughput time and optimization potential. In other words, they bring transparency to corporate processes that would otherwise be difficult to evaluate.
The technology behind this is called process mining.
What is Process Mining?
Process mining is a technology from the fields of machine learning, data mining and process modeling and deals with the systematic analysis and evaluation of actual processes in a company. The goal of process mining is to use the collected data to make statements about how business processes are actually lived in the organization and to continuously improve them.
How does Process Mining work?
Process mining offers the possibility to monitor real processes and to gain insights into how processes work in practice. Process mining can be divided into 3 major areas:
Discovery: With the help of this technique, the data basis for the discovery of the processes is created from a so-called event-log. The process models can be used to
- Initiate a discussion of issues among stakeholders and reach consensus as a result,
- generate ideas for process improvement, and
- Achieve model improvement such as bottleneck analysis.
Conformity:The modeled behavior is compared with the observed behavior. Put simply, it checks whether reality matches the model. The conformity check can be used, among other things, to
- verify the quality of the documented processes
- assess the quality of a discovered process model,
- identify divergent cases and, based on this, understand what they have in common,
- build model improvements, and
- perform audits and compliance monitoring.
Enhancement: This involves trying to extend an existing process model with the help of information about the actual process. This helps to represent reality even better.
What are the advantages of process mining?
If data is available in structured form and digitally, process mining can answer important information about the company:
- Which processes are currently running inefficiently in the company and what opportunities are there for improvement?
- What incidents or deviations do I want to be notified about as soon as they occur so that I can take action?
- What data will help me avoid certain decisions, behaviors or costly mistakes?
Process Mining helps you with:
- Improving the transparency of business processes
- Analysis of business processes from a resource perspective
- Analysis of business process variants and exceptions
- Understanding of compliance with business processes
- Enabling business process comparisons and benchmarking
- Identification of wastage during business processes
- Improving the improvement and redesigning of business processes
- Evaluation of the performance of business processes
- Creating intuitive visualizations for business users
- Promoting evidence-based communication and decision-making
- Cost reduction
Scientific study: Can process mining be carried out using digital checklists?
As part of her master thesis at FH Hagenberg Process Mining, our Data Analyst Sarah took a closer look at the context of digital checklists. In her master’s thesis entitled “Process Discovery on the Basis of Checklists” („Process Discovery auf Basis von Checklisten“) she investigated, in collaboration with Traktionssysteme Austria, whether digital checklists could be used to carry out process mining in companies.
In doing so, she prepared the data of the checklists accompanying the assembly for the rotor and stator and then evaluated them. Thanks to structured data storage with the help of Testify, data preparation and evaluation was possible without any problems. Checklist and section sequences, Directly-Follows-Graph, throughput times by sections and test case sequences were evaluated in this practical example.
The study confirmed that process mining can be carried out due to the structured collection of process data using digital checklists from Testify.
TSA particularly values the transparency through the use of process mining. You can quickly check whether all assembly steps have been checked in accordance with standards and have been properly documented. In addition, process optimizations can be made based on the results. Does the process need to be adjusted? Should check sequences be changed? How can the storage period be shortened? All of these questions can be clarified using process mining in assembly. Thomas Zeitelhofer, Quality Manager at TSA says: “The greatest added value is certainly that we evaluated data within a few minutes. In the past, we had to laboriously compile the contents of each PDF in order to then gain insights!”
Future prospects.
As part of the study, Process Mining was used in a defined area of application. Thanks to the logical structure in Testify, conformity tests can be made possible in the future. In addition, parallelism of various components in the assembly process can be identified. Defects have not yet been integrated, but this is a further logical step in how process mining can be expanded in Testify.
About Testify
Testify is a cloud-based, mobile checklist software for all types of inspections, controls and tests in the industrial environment. Thanks to the no-code technology, process adjustments can be carried out without any IT intervention.
Testify’s areas of application range from production-accompanied quality controls to maintenance controls, audits and field service activities. By using Testify, customers report higher documentation quality, more efficiency in reviews and the possibility of structured data capture in manual processes.
Welcome to the world
of digital checklists.
How we work
The no-code principle