Recap of Process Mining Camp 2017

With more than 220 campers from 24 countries across the world, Process Mining Camp 2017 was filled up to the brim. The atmosphere was amazing. It is only once a year that you can meet so many other process mining enthusiasts to talk shop and to learn from them about their experiences.

Opening Keynote

Anne Rozinat, co-founder of Fluxicon, opened this years camp by celebrating the 5th anniversary of Disco. The recently launched Disco 2.0 introduces TimeWarp, one of the most frequently requested features of all times. With TimeWarp it is now possible to exclude non-working days (like weekends and holidays) as well as non-working hours from your process mining analysis. Take a look at this video to learn how TimeWarp works and how easy it is to make your performance analyses even more precise.

In these 5 years, we have made a lot of friends in the process mining community. From every conversation we learn something. And we understand that process mining is not just a tool but it is a discipline that needs practice to master it. Therefore, we are happy to collaborate with more than 475 academic partners to educate the future process miners. And we are putting a lot of work into sharing our knowledge and helping you all to become the best process miners of the world. As a surprise to the campers, we were proud to announce the online pre-release of our new book Process Mining in Practice at processminingbook.com.

Remco Bunder & Jacco Vogelsang - Dutch Railway

Remco Bunder and Jacco Vogelsang from the NS (Dutch Railway) kicked off with the first talk of the day. Their journey with process mining started exactly one year ago. As visitors, they were inspired by what they saw at Process Mining Camp 2016. Back at their desk they started to experiment with process mining by analyzing all the datasets they got their hands on. Using process mining, they were able to show that it would save a lot of time and effort to wait a few more days before emptying abandoned station lockers. They also noticed that some of the OV bikes that where reported as stolen where actually not stolen at all. These experiments formed the basis for the inspiration and engagement of their colleagues, which resulted in new initiatives and projects that are being launched right now.

Sebastiaan van Rijsbergen - Nationale Nederlanden

Sebastiaan van Rijsbergen was the second speaker of the day. He recognizes the challenges of introducing something as innovative as process mining within an organization. He was very excited when he started with his first process mining project at Nationale Nederlanden. But once he started to share concrete results, he noticed that politics entered the arena very quickly. He got pushback because his results were not always aligned with the viewpoints of all stakeholders. For example, for one process the operational teams experienced a lot of variation – while IT was managing a Straight Through Process. With process mining, it was ultimately possible to get a deeper understanding of how the process was actually working and to take both perspectives into account. In fact, it turned out that they were both right! And focusing on the facts actually brought some peace into the discussion that was not there before.

Wilco Brouwers & Dave Jansen - CZ

Wilco Brouwers and Dave Jansen, from the health insurance company CZ, shared their process mining experience as IT auditors. They see that digital transformation is slowly impacting their work as auditors. They believe that IT skills will become increasingly important for future IT auditors – not only to be more efficient, but also to be more effective. As the frontrunners within their team they have developed a new approach for auditing their digital processes of the future. Process mining plays an important role in this new auditing approach. With concrete examples, they showed where they see differences compared to the traditional approach in the preparation, fieldwork, reporting, and follow-up steps in their audits.

Gijs Jansen - Essent

Gijs Jansen, business intelligence specialist at energy supplier Essent, was the fourth speaker of the day. A few years ago, he was asked by the business manager to create a snake plot and a calculate the ping-pong factor. Too proud to admit that he had no idea what they were talking about he started to investigate. He became aware that the existing reporting didnt answer detailed questions about the processes. For example, why are we losing so much money in the payment collection process. With process mining, he was able to show that the termination of contracts took too long. By visualizing the problem, he was able to engage the teams to dive into the bottlenecks, to understand the actual root causes. He learned that with reporting you can get to a certain level, but the visualizations of process mining in combination with domain knowledge are extremely powerful. Therefore, process mining proved to be so much more meaningful than just a snake plot and a ping-pong factor.

Roel Blankers & Wesley Wiertz - VGZ

The fifth speakers of the day, Roel Blankers and Wesley Wiertz, showed how they can speed up continuous improvement within healthcare insurer VGZ with process mining. They are able to solve operational problems much quicker by combining Lean tools with process mining. Using process mining, they were able to visualize the flow of the dental care process within weeks. This directly pointed them to the bottlenecks, and it showed them that there were long waiting times when the work was handed over from medical advisors to experts and vice versa. By applying the traditional Lean tools, such as 5x Why, they were able to pinpoint the actual root causes. In this way, they were able to reduce the throughput time by 40%. Medical advisors and experts now work much closer together. Especially tracking and evaluating this behavioral change makes process mining a very powerful tool for a Lean expert to check the effect of their changes.

Mick Langeberg - Veco

Mick Langeberg, supply chain manager at Veco, has experienced that process mining is very useful for Lean Six Sigma practitioners. At Process Mining Camp 2015, Veco had already shown how they were able to reduce the production lead time from 10 weeks to 2 weeks. But they didnt stand still and continued to find new opportunities. By extending the data to include the customer touchpoints, they were able to visualize the journey of the customer. Looking into the visualization, a new product development process was discovered. Instead of only producing a sample, in the new product development process pieces needed to be designed, produced and delivered quickly. By shifting priorities, Veco was able to produce customer samples quicker without impacting the regular production lead times. This allows Veco to grow their business, while keeping up the delivery performance for their existing customers.

Process Miner of the Year 2017

At the end of the first day, Carmen Lasa Gmez (right on the photo) from Telefnica was announced as the Process Miner of the Year 2017. Together with process owner Aranzazu Garca Velazquez (left on the photo) they received the prize and presented how they discovered operational drifts in their IT service management processes with process mining. We will share their winning contribution with you in more detail in an upcoming, dedicated article.

Second Day: Workshops

On the second day of camp, 108 process mining enthusiasts joined one of the four workshops. Joris Keizers, Process Miner of the Year 2016, facilitated a workshop to understand the impact of data quality and how tools of Six Sigma can be of help. Mieke Jans, assistant professor at Hasselt University, guided the participants through seven steps to create an even log from raw database tables. Rudi Niks led a discussion of what combination of skills and characteristics make a process miner successful. Anne Rozinat showed participants how to answer 20 typical process mining questions.

We would like to thank everyone for the wonderful time at camp, and we hope to see you again next year!

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Rudi Niks

Rudi Niks

Process Mining and everything else

Rudi has been a process mining pioneer since 2004. As a Process Mining expert and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, he has over ten years of practical, hands-on experience with applying process mining to improve customers’ processes. At Fluxicon, he is sharing his vast experience to make sure you succeed.