LNCE Process Mining: A New Innovative Way to Transform Business Processes

In many organisations, following industry-led solutions and best practices while adopting standardized processes is crucial for improving efficiency, reducing bottlenecks, and ensuring consistency. However, this is not always feasible, as workflows often vary across different departments, regions, or business units. For example, processes like order-to-cash or procure-to-pay may differ geographically or between departments, leading to variations that can result in inefficiencies, compliance issues, and delays.

Such variations across processes can disrupt an organization’s overall performance, making it difficult to maintain consistent quality, timely deliveries, or strong relationships with suppliers and customers. Understanding the root causes of these inefficiencies is essential to eliminating bottlenecks, streamlining workflows, and aligning processes more closely with organizational goals. In this article, Amit Kumar Agrawal Manager, Centre of Excellence at partners 2 innovate and certified Solution Architect, takes us to the details of Process Mining and how it can also help your organization.

What is Process Mining?

Process mining is a practical tool that helps organizations answer not just the “what” and “when” of their processes but also the crucial “why.” Process mining uncovers the variations, highlights bottlenecks, and pinpoints areas where processes don’t align with expected standards or KPIs.

Infor LNCE Process Mining takes this a step further by seamlessly integrating with LNCE Cloud Suite and ERP systems. It combines process integration, data analysis, and implementation alignment to provide clear, actionable insights. Businesses can visualize how their processes actually work, understand the reasons behind inefficiencies, and optimize workflows to drive better performance.

Why LNCE Process Mining is Needed

LNCE Process Mining enable process visibility and analysis. By leveraging real transactional data, it offers a data-driven approach that maps out actual processes, rather than relying on theoretical models. The key benefits include:

• Enhanced Visibility: Provides complete transparency into end-to-end processes, from procurement to production, sales, and more.
• Data-Driven Insights: Utilizes real transactional data to highlight how processes actually occur, uncovering inefficiencies and deviations from standard practices.
• Faster Problem Solving: Advanced analytics and visualization tools enable teams to diagnose issues quickly, minimizing downtime and inefficiencies.
• Proactive Decision-Making: Predictive analytics help foresee challenges before they arise, allowing businesses to take preventive measures and maintain smooth operations.
• Alignment with Continuous Improvement Goals: Supports frameworks like lean principles and Six Sigma by providing actionable insights that drive sustainable process improvements.
• Training and Data issue: identify gaps in training and knowledge by visualizing process performance and pinpointing areas where staff may not be following standard procedures, while also detecting inconsistencies in data and master data.

Setting Up the Process Mining in LNCE

To set up Infor LNCE Process Mining, the following steps are typically involved in the technical setup:

• Data Integration and Load Management: Load transactional data from Infor LNCE ERP or other integrated systems. This involves defining the data source systems, extracting and preparing the necessary datasets, and managing the integration process. Infor Process Mining seamlessly integrates with Cloud Suite ERP systems and data lakes, ensuring smooth data mapping and alignment across multiple business functions.
• Define Event Logs and Object Mapping: Event logs are essential for tracking and analyzing business processes. You’ll need to define which events (e.g., order creation, shipment, invoice processing) need to be captured. Mapping business objects (such as orders, customers, and products) to these event logs is critical to accurately represent process flows
• Data Definition and Attributes: Define key attributes and metrics such as timestamps, process steps, and user actions to facilitate granular analysis of processes. These attributes are typically linked to specific objects and event logs, which help in tracing inefficiencies and variations in workflows
• Define Process Flow Scripts: Process scripts need to be developed to ensure that data flows are mapped correctly and aligned with business process models. These scripts help in identifying discrepancies or bottlenecks and are based on the business rules defined for each process
• Set Up the Insight Designer: The Insight Designer is a tool that allows users to configure dashboards, analytics, and reports based on the process mining results. This step involves defining which insights to track, such as inefficiencies, process variations, or performance against KPIs
• Compliance and Conformance Setup: Ensure that your process mining configurations include compliance checks and conformance rules, which help in identifying deviations from standard processes. These rules will aid in maintaining process consistency across different regions or departments
• Data Monitoring and Continuous Improvement: Once set up, the system enables continuous process monitoring, offering actionable insights for ongoing improvements. The integration with advanced analytics tools ensures that issues can be diagnosed quickly, and improvements can be implemented proactively.

Key Benefits and Capabilities of Process Mining

Infor LNCE Process Mining empowers businesses to streamline operations by offering real-time visibility into workflows, identifying inefficiencies, resolving bottlenecks, and enabling data-driven decision-making. With features like process simulations, continuous monitoring, and collaborative problem-solving, it optimizes critical business functions such as supply chain, manufacturing, customer service, and finance.

• Industry process catalogs – Pre-configured processes for common business functions make deployment faster and easier. These ready-made processes are already configured to meet common business needs, so you don’t have to start from scratch. This reduce the need of extension, saving time and costs during setup while ensuring best practices are followed, which makes deployment faster and more cost-effective.
• Benchmarking – Compare your processes against industry standards. This means looking at how your processes measure up against the best practices in your sector or against performance goals you’ve set within your organization. This comparison helps ensure your business stays competitive and efficient by highlighting gaps or opportunities for optimization.
• Fast ERP Data Integration – The process allows you to easily import ERP data into the process mining system. Once the data is in, it can be customized to fit your needs, making it easier to identify key insights. This helps improve business processes by providing a clearer picture of how things are functioning and where improvements can be made.
• Automatic Optimizations – This process enables quick improvements to business workflows. It connects automatically with automation tools in the enterprise system, which means adjustments and optimizations can be made faster, helping to improve overall efficiency and keep processes running smoothly over time.
• Flexible, Usage-Based Insights – With this feature, businesses can explore insights from any area based on usage patterns. The system allows for easy access to this data, and the licensing is designed to be straightforward and flexible, making it easier to focus on areas that need the most attention or improvement. This flexibility supports informed decision-making across the business.
• Process conformance – Use automated process mining techniques to find instances where business processes are not following the standard procedures. This involves identifying deviations or variations from the expected process flows. Instead of manually analyzing each step, the software automatically compares the actual data with predefined process models, highlighting where the process doesn’t match the intended path. These deviations could signal inefficiencies, compliance issues, or areas that need attention, helping businesses understand where things are going off-track and why.
• Out-of-the-box widgets – Process data can be sorted, grouped, or arranged in a way that fits the analysis. With tools like widgets and visual displays, the data can be shown in formats that highlight important insights. These tools allow for flexible presentation, making it easier to spot trends, compare stages, and focus on specific areas. This flexibility helps tailor the analysis to what’s needed, whether it’s finding patterns, identifying gaps, or discovering areas for improvement.

Summary

Amit Kumar Agrawal explained how Infor Process Mining is more than just a tool—it’s a way for industries to tackle the imbalances and inefficiencies that often go unnoticed in day-to-day operations. It helps businesses truly understand how their processes work, not in theory, but in reality. It facilitates by exposing the areas where things can go wrong, compliance issues may occur and offer a chance to address them before they get out of hand.

Rather than offering a one-size-fits-all solution, this offers a flexibilities that not only stop at collecting data, instead it makes the data useful. Ultimately, Infor Process Mining is about creating a more balanced, efficient way of working and helping organizations adapt as they grow and change.

Written by Amit Kumar 

November 25, 2024