This article is part of a collection of process mining examples organized by industry. You can find the full overview here.

There have been many case studies and experience reports from mining manufacturing processes over the years. It’s always an exciting area because you can see things being made or moved.

• Joris Keizers from Veco achieved a 50% cycle time reduction for their core production process. See also this case study and his interviews.

• Klaus Kühnel and Minh Chau Nguyen analyzed the polysilicon production process at Wacker Chemie AG. One of the projects has resulted in saving the company 17 million Euros per year and another lead to a cost reduction of 400 thousand Euros per year. In the following Process Mining Café with Joris Keizers from Veco, we discussed how you can keep a connection to the physical process when you analyze the data.

• Kevin Joinson GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) developed a new approach for cost deployment. Cost deployment is a method from World Class Manufacturing, where an industrial engineering approach is taken to understand the cost of losses based on 100% of the cost (PDF version).

• Freerk Jilderda from ASML increased the system availability by analyzing and improving lithography system start and calibration sequences. See also this earlier case study of analyzing failure recoveries in ASML’s testing process.

• Giancarlo Lepore from Zimmer Biomet analyzed the material flow in their production process. He compares process mining to the traditional process analysis methods and shows how they were able to resolve data quality problems in their master data management in the ERP system.

• Mick Langeberg from Veco discovered an entire new process ‘From Engineering to Order’ that was not managed before. They could radically accelerate the New Product Development cycle and convert this to an opportunity for faster growth.

• Mark Pijnenburg from Philips Healthcare applied process mining to understand how Philips’ MRI machines are actually used by physicians in the field. The discovered usage patterns increase the test coverage based on real-life behavior for these machines.

• Frank van Geffen and Rudi Niks analyze the IT service management process of Volvo IT. The apply the DMAIC improvement framework.

• Philipp Horn analyzed the world’s largest purchasing process at Volkswagen with Process Mining. He emphasizes the responsibility of the analyst to take all the context information into account.

• Capgemini analyzed the Procure-to-Pay process for AkzoNobel Decorative Paints. 16 local processes could be analyzed in a very short time frame without the need to hold local workshops and process mapping sessions in all these countries.

• This case study shows the first-use consumer test, a version of a usability test, by a television manufacturer. It is one of the earliest applications of process mining to analyze customer journeys (Dutch article).

• See also this example analysis and our process mining café about manufacturing here.

Anne Rozinat

Market, customers, and everything else

• anne@fluxicon.com
• annerozinat
• @arozinat

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.