Process mining and AI: Reveal better ways to do business

Everyone knows technology can improve business processes. It's why legacy systems are continually replaced. But many processes run on a variety of systems, so it's hard to get an end-to-end view of operations. Without this view, it can be difficult to know where to start your transformation.

Thankfully, process mining – a key component of process intelligence – can help. It bridges the gap between disparate underlying systems and the people wanting to transform a process. In short, it gives the end-to-end view that business leaders crave.

Blending AI and process mining expertise means we can reveal how processes run, how to simplify them, and how to build future-proof operations.

Here are some examples of how process mining and artificial intelligence are being used in the enterprise:

• Finance and accounting: Prevent duplicate payments by identifying and blocking duplicate invoices across different systems. Or optimize cash flow by using predictive analysis to assess historical vendor data to anticipate and prevent payment delays
• Supply chain: Use predictive analytics to analyze patterns and trends to forecast future supply chain issues, such as potential delays or stockouts. This leads to proactive planning and risk mitigation
• Banking: Detect fraudulent activities by examining transaction patterns and deviations from normal behavior using advanced AI algorithms. This helps banks spot unusual transactions and avoid financial losses
• Insurance: Analyze claims and transaction data to detect unusual patterns or inconsistencies that could indicate fraud. This helps insurers take proactive measures to combat insurance fraud before making any payouts
• Manufacturing: Explore equipment maintenance processes and downtime statistics. This insight allows manufacturers to schedule maintenance effectively, reduce unplanned downtime, and extend the lifespan of equipment
• Life sciences and healthcare: Identify patterns related to patient safety incidents and adverse events. This information empowers healthcare organizations to avoid such incidents from happening again

If you're keen to explore the potential of process mining and AI, we have some advice to keep in mind.

1. Begin with clear objectives. Whether you are trying to solve a business problem or hoping to accelerate digital transformation, having clearly defined objectives will help unite teams around a common goal. A project charter with realistic objectives, scope, and success criteria will be the foundation for success
2. Approach transformation in phases. Make time for due diligence with your business and technology experts. You want to take a pragmatic approach where you start small – for example, with one region and one system – with an AI proof of concept that validates your ideas and recommendations
3. Remember, technology is a tool; human expertise creates value. Some process mining platforms offer a built-in extract, transform, and load feature to perform data modeling. But technology only works if it's trained by functional experts who have built solid business use cases. A trusted transformation partner should be able to bring this tech and business expertise together

Challenge: A leading research-based pharmaceutical company needed to free up working capital to fund research and development (R&D). However, its data was disparate. As a result, its operations teams spent a lot of time and effort manually identifying the reasons behind inefficient cash flow.

Solution: Genpact used process mining to analyze payment patterns and identified early payments as one of the main reasons behind working capital issues. We discovered that the company pays 11% of invoices early – some with good reason, some without. We then used an AI model to identify the invoices that were paid early without a valid reason.

Impact: Problematic early payments were investigated, analyzed, and shared with the operations team to stop them in their tracks. This unique and automated solution helped to improve cash flow by around $12.7 million and saved many weeks of manual effort. Now, the company has the capital it needs for R&D.

Challenge: A beverage company was struggling to avoid duplicate invoice payments. Visibility was an issue as many of its invoices were processed through external third-party tools. This lack of control meant the operations team spent a huge amount of time and resources manually checking for duplicates and recovering the payments.

Solution: Genpact brought process intelligence to the invoice process. We automated the process of checking for duplicate invoices across multiple systems. Powered by AI, the solution identifies and prevents duplicate payments before they happen.

Impact: Our bespoke solution improved working capital by around $1 million and saved the operations team many months of manual effort. Better still, the solution is future-proof and ready to grow with the business.

Of course, the hottest AI topic is generative AI – a subset of artificial intelligence that generates text, images, audio, video, and code using large deep learning models. As this technology is still in its infancy, the benefits of introducing gen AI into process mining are still to be seen.

However, we expect generative AI will empower users to perform their own interactive chat-based analysis of problematic processes. This means they can self-serve to explore root causes and uncover recommendations for improvement. This analysis will be based on predefined business models and process query language (PQL). This analysis can then be shared as business reports with stakeholders.

In parallel, generative AI will likely be used by data analysts to generate PQL queries that can be stored, customized, and reused based on business needs – dramatically accelerating the time it takes to deploy solutions. But it will be those who act first that will define what the future of these technologies looks like.

You might be raring to get started with process mining, but remember – technology is nothing without the people who introduce it, train it, and manage it. You need a partner with deep functional and industry expertise to turn business process transformation from a vision into reality.

Authored by Manish Gupta, Global Process Mining Leader, Genpact