We are happy to announce that we have just released Disco 2.7.

This release improves the performance and fidelity of Disco’s process maps, especially for data sets with large numbers of activities. We have also added the option to export and load holiday presets to TimeWarp, allowing you to more efficiently re-use your favorite set of holidays.

We recommend that you update at your earliest convenience. Like every release of Disco, this update fixes a number of bugs and improves the general performance and stability.

Keep your feedback coming — Your bug reports and suggestions help us make Disco faster, more stable, more polished, and more useful with every update!

How To Update

You need to install this update of Disco manually. Please download and run the updated installer packages manually from fluxicon.com/disco

Changes

• Process Map:
  • Increased performance and stability of graph layout.
  • Improved the estimation of total and mean durations for aggregated paths.
  • Simplifying process maps with huge numbers of activities made more consistent.
  • Addressed an issue with restoring process maps with large numbers of activities.
• Statistics:
  • High-resolution chart rendering on retina and HiDPI screens.
  • Optimized scaling of timeline charts.
• TimeWarp:
  • Save and load presets for easier re-use.
  • Improved bank holidays navigation UI.
  • Added bank holidays calendar for Saudi Arabia.
• Export:
  • Fixed an issue where graph export could include negative durations.
• Workspace:
  • Improved data integrity safeguards.
• Control Center:
  • Improved hardware detection.
  • Enable proxy server configuration via the system panel.
  • Changing the memory limit is now more reliable on Windows.
  • Extended system information.
• UI:
  • Color management more robust.
  • Improved signup experience on Windows.
  • Improved shutdown flow.
  • Fixed an issue that could prevent proper startup on some setups.
  • Improved layout.
• Connection:
  • Increased security and reliability.
  • Improved stability when connecting through a proxy.
• Update:
  • More reliable auto-updates on Windows.
• Sandbox:
  • Sandbox project is now also available offline.
  • Refreshed sandbox project.
• Windows:
  • Improved general graphics fidelity and performance.
  • Improved installation experience.
• Platform:
  • Improved experience for use with assistive devices.
  • Java update.

You have taken your first steps, dipped your toes in and played around, but now you want to get serious about process mining? Join one of our small-group trainings online!

Disco makes it very easy to get started with process mining: You import some data and Disco produces a process map. That is a great start, but your journey has only just begun — There are a lot of important topics around process mining that you really need to know, so that you can apply it productively: How do you prepare the data? How can you ensure data quality? How can you interpret your results? And also, what kinds of analyses can you even do in the first place?

We have heard all the questions that process mining newcomers ask, and we know the things they often miss when they start out. In this course, we have put all our experience together to give you the essentials that you need to know to be ready for using process mining in practice. Skip the learning by trial and error, and put that documentation and theory books aside for a minute — This training will give you the fundamental knowledge and skills to hit the ground running and use the full potential of process mining in your work.

Our training takes place over a series of interactive web training sessions. This means that you can jump in and ask questions at any point in time, just like you would do in a classroom setting. There are four sessions that run from 15:00 to 17:00 CEST each day (see your own timezone here). Between the sessions, you have a few days to process the materials and practice with additional exercises, on your own time. This online training covers all the practical process mining topics of our popular two-day on-site training.

Dates

The registration for the upcoming three trainings is now open:

• September/October 2020 Training: Mo 28 September, Thu 1 October, Mo 5 October, and Thu 8 October

• November/December 2020 Training: Mo 23 November, Thu 26 November, Mo 30 November, and Thu 3 November

• January/February 2021 Training: Mo 25 January, Thu 28 January, Mo 1 February, and Thu 4 February

See further details and reserve your spot for the training now!

Niels Martin from Hasselt University and his colleagues from Fraunhofer FIT, University of Melbourne, University of Tartu, University of Bayreuth, QUT, and RWTH Aachen are currently doing a study on process mining opportunities and challenges.

They are taking an interesting approach: First, they have asked a large group of process miners from academia and industry to name five opportunities and five challenges that they see for process mining in practice. Then, they classify these opportunities and challenges further and gradually narrow them down in subsequent rounds with the same people.

Which opportunities and challenges would you put on the list based on your own experiences? Here are the five opportunities and challenges that I came up with in the initial questionnaire:

Opportunities

• Make hidden processes visible. Processes are performed by many people and supported by IT systems. As a consequence, nobody can really “see” them in their entirety. Process mining makes these processes visible and shows what is really happening. This is the necessary prerequisite to improve anything, because you can only improve what you can “see” and measure.

• Provide objective reference point for discussion. Too many decisions are based on little more than gut feeling and opinions. This can lead to political situations that can even end in a deadlock situation, where nothing is decided (because people disagree about what the problem is). Process mining can bring rationality and peace into such discussions by making them fact-based.

• Accelerate improvement initiatives. Methodologies like BPM, Lean, and Six Sigma are used to improve processes. The basis for these improvement initiatives is the understanding of the current process. This often happens manually and is very time-consuming. With process mining, the process improvement professionals can engage the stakeholders on a completely different level by asking “Why are we doing it this way?” rather than spending a lot of time on understanding “What are we actually doing?”.

• Increase assurance in audits. Auditors today typically take samples of cases when they perform an audit for a process. Based on these samples, they assess the compliance for the whole process. With process mining, auditors can base their audit on the full population (100% of the data) and, therefore, increase the assurance of their audits.

• Provide process perspective for data scientists. Data scientists use a whole range of techniques, including statistics and machine learning, to perform advanced analyses on data for various use cases. However, all these techniques do not really capture the process perspective. Process mining is an additional tool in the toolbox of the data analyst that can provide a process view to, for example, visualize and analyze customer journeys.

Challenges

• Understanding what process mining can and cannot do. In some circles, there is a bit of a hype around process mining. This enthusiasm can be good to raise awareness about the topic but, for people who are new to process mining, it can make it difficult to understand what you can and cannot do with a process mining tool. Furthermore, the process mining tools on the market are very different, because they focus on different use cases. Organizations first need to think about their own use case to understand what they need.

• Preparing the data. One of the first insights when starting to look for process mining data is often that there are data quality problems. This insight is already valuable by itself, because the data is often also used for other types of analyses. However, addressing these data problems is a hurdle that the organization needs to face. Extracting and preparing the data can take time in the beginning, but it gets easier over time.

• Finding the right place for process mining in the organization. Process mining needs someone who does the analysis. Furthermore, to get the benefits that process mining can provide, it is also crucial that someone then actually does something based on those insights (for example, improve the process). Who will build up this expertise in the organisation? It can be a central process excellence team, a process analyst in a particular department, or an auditor. But whoever it may be, process mining needs to be integrated into their way of working.

• Building a culture of cooperation. Process mining can feel threatening for people who don’t feel safe that the results will not be used against them, or who do not fully understand the analyses that are performed and why. Taking people with you on the journey is very important to create acceptance of the results and to get their input. For this, building up a respectful culture of cooperation and clear communication about what is done, for which purpose, are essential — As is the respect for data privacy laws and practices.

• Keep doing it. It can be a challenge to get process mining to “stick” in the organization. Stopping with process mining after investing time and effort in it is a pity, especially because new initiatives become easier and add more benefits in the future. Companies need to make sure that they establish their process mining expertise in the whole team and not just rely on a single person, who might leave at some point in time. Furthermore, if external consultants are hired then they need to transfer their knowledge before the end of the project.

The study is still in progress. I am just one of the many people who are participating, and I am very curious about the results of this work. Follow Niels to read the study once it is published!

We are happy to announce that we have just released Disco 2.6.

This release improves the performance, fidelity, and the reliability of timeline charts in the statistics view of Disco. We have also expanded the selection of holiday calendar presets in TimeWarp, and loading CSV files should be even more reliable now.

We recommend that you update at your earliest convenience. Like every release of Disco, this update fixes a number of bugs and improves the general performance and stability.

Thank you all for your feedback, bug reports, and suggestions. We could not do this without you, and we hope you like Disco 2.6!

How To Update

Disco will automatically download and install this update the next time you run it, if you are connected to the internet. If you are using Disco offline, you can download and run the updated installer packages manually from fluxicon.com/disco

Changes

• Process Map: Improved layout for secondary metrics.
• Statistics:
  • Greater precision and accuracy of cases-over-time and events-over-time charts in overview.
  • Improved fidelity of timeline charts rendering.
• TimeWarp:
  • Extended selection of holiday calendars.
  • Improved stability and performance.
• CSV Import:
  • Improved file encoding auto-detection accuracy.
  • UI fixes for high-resolution displays.
• Workspace: Improved data integrity safeguards and garbage collection.
• UI: Toolbar behavior more consistent.
• Platform: Java update.

Process Mining Camp was a lot of fun this year. Thank you all who stopped by and joined us at the campfire!

We particularly liked the discussions in the community this year. Having a full day to think about your questions allowed more people to jump in and participate. And the campfire Slack community as a place for ongoing discussions allowed everyone to talk to each other — even during the presentations.

We also had more time for the discussions with the speakers on our virtual stage. It was nice to come together with the presenters of the previous day again in our daily Process Mining Café (below you can see a screenshot of the Café session with Carmen and Noortje from Total Gas and Power). It allowed us to go over the feedback and questions in a more structured way in this whole new follow-up format.

A very nice daily surprise for us (and for all the campers!) were the contributions by Ferry Timp. Ferry is an auditor and process miner and, at the same time, an amazing talent in creating live drawings from a presentation or discussion. Below, you can see an excerpt from his visual notes of Day 6 ¹.

A big thanks to all the speakers for their great presentations and to all of you for joining us at this year’s camp. We really enjoyed hanging out with you, and we look forward to seeing you again very soon!

To be kept in the loop about future editions of Process Mining Camp sign up at our camp mailing list here.