Business process discovery

Business process discovery (BPD) related to process mining is a set of techniques that automatically construct a representation of an organization’s current business processes and its major process variations. These techniques use evidence found in the existing technology systems that run business processes within an organization.


Business process discovery techniques


Business process discovery techniques embody the following properties:
Emergent paradigm - Current methods are based on top-down structured manual interviews relying on second-hand representations of the business process/system behaviors. An automated discovery process relies on collecting data from the information system over a period of time. This data can then be analyzed to form a process model.
Automated process discovery – By automating the analysis of the data, the subjectivity of current manual process analysis techniques is removed. The automated system has an ingrained methodology that — through repeated trials — has been shown to accurately discover processes and process variations without bias.
Accurate information- Since the information is collected from the actual source it cannot be inaccurate, as opposed to gathering it from second party representation.

Complete information - An automated process captures all the information that is occurring within the system and represents them by time, date, user, etc.... Since the information is collected from real-time interactions, it is not subject to lost or selective memory issues. This includes completeness regarding exceptions in the processes. Often, exceptions are treated as statistical “noise,” which may exclude important inefficiencies in business processes.
Standardized Process - The automated collection of information yields process data which can be grouped, quantified and classified. This supplies a basis for the development and monitoring of both current and new processes, to which benchmarks can be assigned. These benchmarks are the root of both new process design and the determination of problem root cause. Additionally, standardized process data can set the stage for efforts at continuous process improvement.