We find that business process management (BPM) and process mining are usually explained too academically without explaining why they’re useful in practice and more importantly how to apply them in practice! In this blog post, we motivate the needs for business processes and BPM and explain how process mining naturally emerges in this text. Finally, we give you some tool recommendations. IMPORTANT: This post was written in five different versions for different industries Oil & Gas / Manufacturing: Aramco, Ma’aden, Alfanar… Petrochemicals: SABIC, Petro Rabigh, Tasnee… Electricity & Utilities: Saudi Electricity Company, ACWA, Marafiq Telecommunications: stc, Mobily, Zain Banking: SNB, Al Rajhi, Riyad Bank All Industries: for general process excellence representatives Oil & Gas / Manufacturing Petrochemicals Electricity & Utilities Telecommunications Banking General Proces Excellence Edit Content Why Even Complicate Our Lives with Business Processes? What is a business? Any enterprise or organization with the purpose of making a profit. Why do you then need business processes to make a profit? A business maximizes its profit by providing value to its customers. Once an oil and gas company refines crude oil into fuel or other products multiple times, it learns which practices and activities led to the best quality and highest yield. If an oil and gas company always refines crude oil in the best way, it will generate more value for the customer, i.e., more profit. The company can increase its profit by always refining crude oil with that same excellence. To ensure the company delivers every barrel of refined oil with the highest quality, it has to document the practices that led to the excellent product. The documentation of these best practices that led to the best-refined products is exactly what a business process is. A business process is a sequence of steps/activities that aims to fulfill a certain business objective. We now motivated the need for business processes. Business Process Management Business Process Management (BPM) is a set of methods to ensure refinery operations are always conducted in a way that adheres to best practices. Based on this definition, we’ll motivate the need for the methods and specific tools to fulfill that goal of business process management. Starting with the goal. The goal is to always refine crude oil in the best way as documented by the business process model. But how do we do that? We do the following: Conduct refining operations enough times. Monitor the past refining operations. Pick out the past refining runs that were the best. Examine which steps occurred before the best refining runs. Derive a should-be step-for-step guide (should-be process model) that encapsulates the steps that led to the best refining runs. Conduct all future refining runs as dictated by the step-for-step guide (should-be process model). But wait. Are we done? Do we till the end of time keep refining oil with perfect quality? Well sadly, it does not work that way. Iterative Business Process Management In an ideal world, we would just keep refining oil as dictated by the step-for-step guide till the end of time. We’d follow the so-called “happy-path” every time. We have two problems with the current way of ensuring the product is always refined in the best way. The first problem is that circumstances change. Perhaps the step-for-step guide (should-be process model) dictated before that all crude oil with a sulfur content > 0.5% needs additional processing. But the circumstances changed in that the company now has new desulfurization technology that makes additional processing unnecessary. The more optimal approach for the company would be to update the process to skip that step for crude oil with sulfur content < 1%. The second problem is that the business might have not conducted enough refining runs to actually get a good picture of what the best-refined products look like. Consider if we only refined 100 batches of crude oil before writing the step-for-step guide. And in the 101st batch, we discover that pre-heating the crude oil in a certain way results in higher yields. We’d discover a better step-for-step guide for future refining operations. This motivates the need for the iterative approach. In this approach, we never settle on one should-be process model till the end of time. We only keep a should-be process model for a specific period of time and then we re-evaluate it once we conducted enough refining runs. So after defining the should-be process model, we start over again and go through all steps again. Conduct refining operations enough times. Monitor the past refining operations. Pick out the past refining runs that were the best. Examine which steps/activities occurred before the best refining runs. Derive a should-be step-for-step guide (should-be process model) that encapsulates the steps that led to the best refining runs. Conduct refining operations enough times. In this iterative business process management, we keep improving upon our should-be process model to always ensure we are doing things the best way we could. But how do we actually do this in practice? Note: In classical BPM literature, these steps are referred to as Design ⇒ Model ⇒ Execute ⇒ Monitor ⇒ Optimize ⇒ Design. But the idea is essentially the same. Requirements & Methods Let’s examine our lifecycle again to find what systems & methods are required to do this in practice. Conduct refining operations enough times For actually conducting the refining runs, we don’t need any additional requirements or tools. Monitor the past refining operations To monitor the past refining runs, we need to have the outcomes and the steps/activities of previous runs documented. For example, we can have every step of all previous batches documented on paper, but that would be impractical. The way this is done nowadays is using an IT system like a Distributed Control System (DCS) or an ERP system. ⇒ Requirement 1: IT system Pick out the past refining runs that were the best To pick out which refining runs were the best, we need to firstly have some definition of what the best looks like.