Process improvement is nothing new in the business world, but gone are the days of solely relying on subjective, time-consuming tactics like interviews, surveys, and manual observations. And it’s all thanks to process intelligence.

Let’s dive into what process intelligence is, how it works, and how it can benefit you in your intelligent automation journey.

What is Process Intelligence?

Process intelligence is a combination of data-driven capabilities that work toward analyzing and optimizing business processes. It takes data from the different information systems your business relies on, analyzes it, and uncovers patterns and insights that reveal new operational inefficiencies that are holding you back. But it can also simulate process changes, monitor your processes, make predictions, and more.

What is Process Intelligence?

Let’s take a closer look at what process intelligence looks like in action, broken down into 5 key components:

The 5 Components of Process Intelligence

1. Get the Real Picture of Your Processes with Process Discovery

Process discovery helps you understand how a process actually operates by using process mining and task mining. With process mining, you can reconstruct processes from events recorded in logs, and with task mining, you can fill process gaps by mining the desktop activity of your users. In other words, these tools fill in what would otherwise be gaps in your processes, allowing you to identify redundancies and bottlenecks you otherwise would’ve missed.

2. Dig Deeper into Your Data with Process Analysis

In process analysis, you can visualize and analyze process data using specialized tools. A big emphasis in this component is ensuring these tools are accessible to all your users, whether they’re technical or not, so their voices can be heard as you make decisions. Not only do they likely have stellar ideas that’ll lead to better outcomes but giving all staff an active role in the changes you’re making will go a long way in your change management efforts. This approach also fosters a culture of continuous improvement.

3. Keep Watch Over Your Processes with Process Monitoring

If you have a certain process pattern you’d like to track, process monitoring can help. Simply define the specific process pattern you’d like the technology to detect either when they happen or when they don’t. Then, when that specified event occurs, it’ll either alert you or trigger a defined action. This is especially useful in efforts like monitoring the customer experience, cutting processing times, and minimizing compliance risks.

4. “See the Future” with Process Prediction

Here’s where AI really comes into play: Process prediction trains an AI engine to predict the most probable outcome of a process ahead of time using historical execution pattern data. This way, you can proactively address incoming issues before they escalate, which ultimately leads to more savings, happier customers, and fewer “fires” to put out across your business.

5. Test Your Ideas with Process Simulation

Got a process improvement idea in mind? Process simulation gives you a mechanism for using process histories to configure a simulation. As a result, you can get an idea of the potential impact of a proposed process change without actually having to implement it. It’s an easier way to test new ideas, helping you make more informed decisions as you continue to improve your business processes over time.

Top 4 Benefits of Process Intelligence

1. It Enhances Your Productivity and Efficiency

Process intelligence lets you quickly and accurately find bottlenecks and redundancies in your processes, including ones the human eye could likely never detect. As a result, you can apply your findings to optimize your processes to reduce manual work and enhance productivity. And when you think about it, process intelligence makes the endeavor of process improvement more efficient too, saving you even more time.

2. It Saves You Money

While you’re finding and fixing inefficiencies in your processes, you’ll be able to take advantage of savings opportunity after savings opportunity. This can surface in a variety of ways: Maybe it’ll show you a more effective way to allocate your resources. Or it could let you eliminate a manual or error-prone process that used to require costly human intervention. And of course, the increased productivity process intelligence brings is great for savings, too.

3. It Supports Your Compliance and Risk Management Efforts

Process monitoring in particular can support your compliance and risk management efforts, as it can identify compliance lapses and intervene early on. This way, issues are addressed faster and your risk of facing legal consequences are reduced.

4. It Enables Data-Driven Decision-Making

As we explored in both process prediction and process monitoring, this technology gives us a deeper look into how process execution patterns correlate with specific outcomes. With these insights at your fingertips, you can make more strategic, informed decisions in your intelligent automation journey that’s based on real data, past and present.

5. It Facilitates Continuous Process Improvement

With process monitoring and process analysis, you can both track your processes and look for optimization opportunities. With these two abilities in hand, you’re free to proactively seek process improvement, which will let you remain agile.

Add Process Intelligence to Your Intelligent Automation Toolkit

By adding process intelligence to your intelligent automation toolkit, you can uncover hidden inefficiencies and gain a detailed understanding of your operations. This not only gives you a competitive edge by accounting for every detail for better business outcomes but also ensures you remain agile in today’s rapidly evolving business world.