We had a great day at Process Mining Camp three weeks ago! Half of the campers came from the Netherlands. The other half came from 15 different countries, some from places as far away as Brazil, the USA, and South Korea.
Because camp tickets were sold out very quickly, and the waiting list grew larger and larger, we were even running a livestream this year.
Anne Rozinat – Fluxicon, Netherlands
The program was started off by our keynote, where we shared our view on how we can advance process mining adoption. At the end of the keynote, we gave a sneak preview of what is coming very soon with Disco 1.7. The campers we spoke with were very excited about the new functionalities. Stay tuned!
John Müller – ING, Netherlands
Then, John Müller showed us how ING Direct Australia had used process mining to improve the customer journey across website and callcenter channels. It was a great example of how business users are empowered by process mining, because they can analyze their own process directly, in an interactive and explorative way – rather than having to wait six months for their new report from BI.
Oliver Wildenstein – MLP, Germany
Oliver Wildenstein from MLP gave a new perspective on using process mining to monitor outsourcing providers. Many companies have outsourced processes, but are these processes really meeting the performance criteria that are in the contract? Without process mining, one has to believe the self-reports from the provider. With process mining, the customer gets a controlling mechanism for the outsourced process – but often has to pay to get access to the data.
Nicholas Hartman – CKM Advisors, USA
Nicholas Hartman from CKM Advisors showed us based on two IT Service Management examples how process mining helps to derive actionable insight for process improvement projects. Typical management reporting is not actionable, because it is heavily averaged and the granularity is limited by pre-determined categories. Process mining can be used to find the actual problem areas, such as bottlenecks. Furthermore, it can help to find out where cases could have been prevented in the first place – because the most efficient process is one that doesn’t happen at all!
Johan Lammers – CBS, Netherlands
After the lunch break, Johan Lammers from Statistics Netherlands took us on a journey how official statistics are made. One way to study dynamics in statistics is to take snapshots of data over time. A special way is the panel survey, where a group of cases is followed over time. To produce statistics of good quality, and as cost-efficiently as possible, process improvement and process mining can be used. Johan showed concrete results from analyzing the labor force survey process – and how process mining could test certain hypotheses much faster compared to statistical tools like SPSS.
Workshops
Then, five parallel workshops provided an opportunity to share knowledge in smaller groups, with a deep-dive on specific topics. The workshop topics were “How to get management buy-in”, “Managing complexity in process mining”, “Data science tools that complement process mining”, “Process mining and customer experience”, and “Process mining and lean”.
Erik Davelaar – KPMG, Netherlands
After the workshops, Erik Davelaar from KPMG presented three case studies, where they used process mining at their clients. In one project, the processes were different for every country, and process mining helped to understand and audit these differences. In another project, the access rights were not strictly enforced on the system level, but with process mining segregation of duty violations could be assessed objectively. And in the third project deviations from the expected process were found. Process mining provides clear benefits – both for auditors and auditees.
Frank van Geffen – Rabobank, Netherlands
The last practice speaker was Frank van Geffen from the Rabobank, who shared their impressive journey of adopting process mining worldwide. In one of the projects, an IT service desk process could be improved such that after 6 months the team had reduced waiting time in aggregate by 72,000 hours, and prevented 2,000 incidents from being raised. In another project business expense claim turnaround time has been reduced from 11 days to 1.2 days. Frank ended his presentation with concrete recommendations for how you can make process mining a success in your own organization.
Wil van der Aalst – TU Eindhoven, Netherlands
In his closing keynote, Wil van der Aalst from TU Eindhoven, the “godfather of process mining”, talked about how process mining fits in the wider data science spectrum and which research programs will be coming up at the new Data Science Center Eindhoven (DSC/e). At the DSC/e, process mining will be combined with other data science techniques such as data mining and statistics, the internet of things, but also look at human and social aspects.
Panel Discussion
This year, Process Mining Camp was closed by a panel discussion, where we brought together different process mining perspectives.
Next to the previous speakers Wil van der Aalst (representing academia), Frank van Geffen (representing industry), and Nicholas Hartman (representing consultancies), we were joined by our very own Christian Günther and two industry analysts, Marc Kerremans from Gartner and Neil Ward-Dutton from MWD Advisors in the UK.
The discussion was very lively and followed up on a number of themes that were brought up earlier throughout the day.
One of the themes was around adoption. While Marc Kerremans said that process mining was quickly climbing the Gartner hype cycle, Neil Ward-Dutton disagreed and insisted that we are much earlier in the adoption curve than that.
This was also discussed in the context of maturity: 90% of the business uses pen, paper, Powerpoint, and Visio for process improvement. Process mining can provide huge benefits here also without combining it with other tools like data mining.
Wil van der Aalst suggested that today’s business analysts need to become more nerdy to use new technologies. Furthermore, Frank van Geffen made the point that organizations need to create the space for innovation. They need to allow people to experiment with new techniques like process mining to be able to eventually roll them out broadly and productively as done at the Rabobank.
Finally, it was also discussed that once one is using data-driven analysis techniques like process mining, one needs to ensure that data and analysis results are used responsively and in accordance with the rules and ethics of the society and the company.
The audience really liked the practice talks and keynotes, workshops, and the panel discussion, and we would like to thank all speakers and panelists again for their contributions!
See you next year!
Because our campers were happy the hosts were very happy at the end of the day, too.
Would you like to look at some of the presentations (again), or share them with your colleagues? All speakers were so kind to provide a public PDF version of their slides. You can download them here:
The five workshop hosts have also provided their slides and materials for you to download (contact them directly if you have questions about the materials):
We recorded the practice talks, the keynotes, and the panel discussion, but making them available will take some more time.
If you want to be notified about new videos and next year’s Process Mining Camp, you can sign up on our Process Mining Camp mailing list here.
See you all next year!
Anne Rozinat
Market, customers, and everything else
Anne knows how to mine a process like no other. She has conducted a large number of process mining projects with companies such as Philips Healthcare, Océ, ASML, Philips Consumer Lifestyle, and many others.
info@fluxicon.com