Discovery | Compliance | Extension

Welcome to the seventh edition of the Procurro Insider, where our mission is to empower and inspire you to reach your full life potential. We are here to guide you on this journey toward self-discovery and fulfillment. You will find practical tips and strategies to help you navigate the challenges and opportunities, be it your career, your hobbies, or simply defining what is purposeful for you. By exploring your values, passions, and strengths, you can unlock your full potential and live an authentic, meaningful, and fulfilling life. Sound interesting? Click Subscribe above to be notified of each edition.

Data collection key
Process mining brings discovery,
As-is to improved.        

Running a big business is like untangling a ball of yarn, and it can be complicated and mind-numbingly frustrating. When you think you've got a process down pat, someone comes along and starts pulling at threads, unraveling everything you thought you knew. You created and documented processes and did a good job identifying all the actors and understanding how the process works. You documented what you found out, and everyone validated your findings, but then this happens - someone strays from the main road.

No, you can't say that the road is the standard flow and that the two other paths created are alternate flows. Obviously, some actors felt the standard process did not meet their needs. Bet you this happens a lot with end-users. They will follow a process that works best for them and doesn't care about your ideal workflow. So what do you do?

Enter process mining, one of the fastest-growing areas of information technology. Its dull name notwithstanding, process mining is making waves, generating around $1 billion in annual sales in 2022, according to IT consultancy Gartner. Celonis, a German process miner, recently raised $1 billion at a valuation of $13 billion, making it Germany's most prominent startup and its hottest tech success story since SAP, a business-software giant, was founded 50 years ago.

Process mining addresses three distinct situations. The first category is called discovery. We often talk about the current and future state and how you need documentation to cover the as-is to understand the transformation to your new and improved processes. Process mining is one approach you can take to understand and document what you have running right now. Let your data tell you the idea. Of course, to use process mining, you need to be collecting data. No data, no mining.

The next category is compliance, and here we look at two aspects. So we say these are our processes. Are they? You might think everyone is staying on the main road and have no idea about the two alternate paths. First, you need to be made aware to ask the question, WHY. Once steps one and two have been accomplished, you can look at the correction. Concerns external compliance elements that your organization needs to adhere to. We might be looking at government regulations, where you can be penalized if they are not being adhered to, or they can be contractual, where you can also be penalized if they are not adhered to….or even worse. A client could claim a breach of contract. Not where you want to be.

Our last category is called extension, and here we are looking primarily at performance. So we confirmed that what we said we do, we did it. This does not tell you how effective your processes are. Here we should look at the processes' sound, comparing the performance to some benchmarking. Considering how important time to market is for virtually all organizations, such information could be quite valuable. How about applying scenario analysis? Wouldn't it be great to use your historical data to judge better what the performance COULD look like if you made some changes? Here, simulations could also be very valuable. You should know if you will have a bottleneck before it takes place.

It's still not too late to register for our live stream next Thursday, May 4th. We will be covering those steps we need to cover to ensure our deliverables can be used at the end of the project. Should we start our project by thinking about how we perform the training? What are your thoughts?

Simulation's power
Comparing to benchmarking
Improving process        

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