What is process mining?

Process mining is a family of techniques relating the fields of data science and process management to support the analysis of operational processes based on event logs. The goal of process mining is to turn event data into insights and actions. Process mining is an integral part of data science, fueled by the availability of event data and the desire to improve processes.Process mining techniques use event data to show what people, machines, and organizations are really doing. Process mining provides novel insights that can be used to identify the executional path taken by operational processes and address their performance and compliance problems.

Process mining starts from event data. Input for process mining is an event log. An event log views a process from a particular angle. Each event in the log should contain (1) a unique identifier for a particular process instance (called case id), (2) an activity (description of the event that is occurring), and (3) a timestamp. There may be additional event attributes referring to resources, costs, etc., but these are optional. With some effort, such data can be extracted from any information system supporting operational processes. Process mining uses these event data to answer a variety of process-related questions.

Process mining brings together data mining, data science and process management to find process efficiencies.