What is Process Intelligence & 5 Reasons Why It Matters in '24?

Process management, also known as process improvement, enables companies to enhance process performance and broadly increase the operational excellence across the board. Therefore, more decision makers are willing to adopt process management tools for process optimization.

Yet, various vendors offer tools with different names, such as process intelligence software and process mining. Vendors highlight the distinct capabilities between the tools by naming them differently, but the cover image shows how these two solutions move together and converge across time. These names differences could confuse business analysts, process experts, and business leaders, making it challenging to implement process improvement.

In that light, this research aims to address this challenge by explaining what process intelligence, discussing if it’s different to process mining, and providing you with five reasons as to why you should implement process intelligence.

What is process intelligence?

Process intelligence is the practice of collecting and analyzing the process data to identify bottlenecks and improve operational efficiency. Process intelligence allows business analysts to discover each step within a workflow, the personnel in charge, the duration of the entire process, the average wait time, and the issues with the process.  

Process intelligence tools include:

1. Process Mining 
2. Process modeling 
3. Task mining
4. The digital twin of an organization (DTO)

Process intelligence tools employ ML algorithms to collect event data in a process from systems and applications, such as ERP and CRM, and to analyze the data and visualize the process. These tools help monitor and discover processes by exploring historical or real-time process data. To learn more on each tool, read our process improvement framework article.  

Process Mining vs. Process Intelligence 

Some vendors name their process management capabilities as process intelligence software. By calling their product process intelligence, vendors highlight that their software leverages ML & computer vision to disentangle complex processes and additional capabilities. Vendors also refer to process intelligence as an upgraded process mining which integrates task mining and a DTO.  

However, many process mining vendors also benefit from machine learning (e.g algorithms and context awareness) to automate their data collection, process discovery, and root cause analysis while providing additional capabilities such as predictive process mining. Thus, these vendors integrate their platform with a DTO and task mining capability, as well.

Check out comprehensive and constantly updated list of process mining case studies to find out more on process mining real-life examples.

Why is process intelligence important?

Process intelligence help analysts understand process execution, assess process performance, detect bottlenecks, and discover automation opportunities. Based on these insights, analysts can optimize their processes, eventually improving customer experience and reducing cost.

Here is a list of benefits you can gain by deploying process intelligence:

1. Process Intelligence enables data-driven decision making

The digital and physical systems (e.g SAP, IoT or sensors) used in daily operations generate an outstanding amount of data.

Process intelligence tools allow you to leverage this data to discover patterns and insights for data-driven decision making. You can collect, aggregate and clean the process data to centralize your business operations.

2. Process Intelligence helps establish best practices

Business leaders and analysts often have an idea of how their processes are executed, but it is usually a quite limited understanding of their operations, one that lacks context and knowledge of the process.

You can utilize process intelligence to understand how your processes operate and compare each employee or team to manage the operations to determine the optimal method. Then, you can establish best practices for the rest of your business processes. For example, you can generate process definition documents based on your optimal process execution to serve as an ideal model for the latter.

3. Process Intelligence identifies and eliminates inefficiencies

Processes often contain deviations, bottlenecks, errors (such as tasks that are disintegrated with the entire process), and dysfunctional processes which hinder overall productivity.

You can capture, analyze, identify, and visualize your processes with process intelligence tools. As a result, you can pinpoint the bottlenecks in a workflow and deviations from the idealized processes by checking the models, digging into the root causes behind the issues, and start improving them. This will help eliminate inefficiencies in the model.

4. Process Intelligence allow you to optimize your costs

You can allocate more money by optimizing your budget, which is feasible with process intelligence. Once you establish your ideal processes and eliminate the bottlenecks and deviations, you will notice that your operational costs will start to go down. This will provide you with an optimized budget to allocate to other aspects of your business.

5. It enables progressing faster and efficiently

Process improvement is considered a long and iterative initiative because it requires communicating with different teams, collecting data and cleaning it, mapping and analyzing processes based on the gathered data. Therefore, business analysts might hesitate to undertake a process improvement project.

Process intelligence tools can help analysts shorten the time and efforts in such projects by automating the process improvement. This will allow business analysts to progress faster by obtaining results and implementing the changes. Thus, automation decreases human intervention and potential errors, saving time and preventing iterations.

Further Reading

You can read our articles to learn on the use cases and real life examples of process intelligence tools:

• Process improvement case studies
• 33 Use Cases and Applications of Process Mining

If you believe you can benefit from process intelligence in your business, you can view our data-driven lists of process mining software.

Explore other tools that can complement process intelligence by understanding, managing and improving your process flows, such as:

• Workflow management software
• Business process management software
• Low-code/No-code development platform
• Onboarding software

Assess different vendors with a transparent methodology yourself by downloading our checklist: 

And, if you need more guidance, we can help you find the right vendor: