Are we afraid to face the future? In the aftermath of stormy 2020, we present the top 7 Process Mining predictions for the year.

2020 was a very productive year for Minit and the overall Process Mining industry as many organisations needed to realign their operating models and processes to adapt to the COVID19 situation. it was a wake-up call!!!

Yes, Process Mining is not a nice to have capability anymore as it is bringing a tangible solution to the long-lasting challenges of performing process mapping workshops and SME interviews which were not really reliable and effective. If you are interested to know more about this topic, I invite you to read my previous article detailing the challenges of running the process mapping methodology with this link: https://bit.ly/3pbGzEz

So, what will happen this year?

I don't want to ruin the surprise, but I thought I’d offer a sneak peek at my 2021 top 7 predictions for the #ProcessMining market.

1- Process Mining will become a mainstream technology as #RPA did in the past 2-3 years.

I predict that we will experience a stiffed acceleration in both market demand and production project initiated this year.

Even though the interest in process mining is growing quickly, we are just at the early stage of its product lifecycle as detailed in the graph below:

Until today, only a few organisations have implemented process mining at scale and most of the Innovators have only mined a few processes. They are now planning and budgeting to scale it across their organisations widely and will not be afraid to swap existing process mining solutions for a more relevant one if necessary.

In parallel, Early-adopters are now initiating their Process Mining programs by running Proof Of Values, procurement processes, and training or recruiting process mining experts.

To support this growth, Systems Integrators will train 100s if not 1000s of their people on Process Mining as they did with RPA. Every dollar generated from a Process mining project will exponentially generate an additional $10 to implement the improvement recommendations.

In 2019, Gartner estimated the process mining market for new product license and maintenance revenue to reach $320 million and predicted this market to triple in upcoming years.

2- Process Optimisation CoEs will become a profit center that will generate savings, competitive advantages and profit across their organisation globally.

COEs (Center of Excellence) will focus on revenue creation as well as savings in all areas of the business from customer services to production to delivery of their products and services.

Premium services delivered through higher quality, speed, and innovation will be monetized to customers and suppliers (very similar to the Amazon prime model).

3- Process Mining will become affordable for emerging markets.

As the demand grows in the emerging markets, vendors will package lighter value proposition at a more affordable price point to equip those markets. the largest companies in those markets will implement standard enterprise packages from process mining vendors.

4- RPA bots will have to wait

This one will be a provocative prediction for many of you. There has been a lot of marketing effort from RPA vendors to solve the automation scaling challenges by promoting the capability of the process mining to help with the identification of new automation opportunities.

And yes, process mining can help uncover automation opportunities but the challenge still remains as there is no point in automating a broken process for the sake of automation. Process optimisation experts will always focus their efforts on analysing/understanding, fixing, and then improving a process potentially by applying Automation strategies but not only.

5- Process Mining will offer AI and advanced analytical capabilities to speed up the analysis and generation of improvement recommendations

Process Mining solution will move into offering predictive and prescriptive analytics to respectively predict futures states/outcomes and recommend actions to maximize outcomes.

Those capabilities will still need to be user friendly and intuitive for entry-level users to benefit from them. 

6- Process mining vendors will offer a full suite of capabilities to equip process optimisation COEs

They will either build basic capabilities or partner with state-of-the-art solutions to offer a best of breed platform (E.g Task Mining, Process Modelling/ToBe Simulation, alert/automation engine).

Process optimisation COEs will benefit from accessing all of those capabilities for its day to day activities.

7- Organisations will deploy process mining solutions as they wish

Many organisations are still obliged to install technological solutions within their premises or private cloud for data security reasons.

Knowing that any process mining solution can store the full process DNA of any organisation, it is quite understandable.

Looking forward to a great year.

Let’s collaborate and make process mining better & stronger.

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