Progressing from Process Mining Insights to Process Improvement: Challenges and Recommendations

Many organizations have adopted process mining to analyze their business processes, gain insights into their performance, and identify improvement opportunities. Several academic case studies and reports from practice leave no doubt that process mining tools can deliver substantial value to organizations and help them to realize improvements. However, both organizations and academics have also realized that the path from obtaining insights via process mining to realizing the desired improvements is far from trivial. Existing process mining methodologies pay little to no attention to this matter and mainly focus on how to obtain insights through process mining. In this paper, we address this research gap by conducting a qualitative study based on 17 semi-structured interviews. We identify seven challenges pertaining to translating process mining insights into process improvements. Furthermore, we provide five specific recommendations for practitioners and stakeholders that should be considered before starting a new process mining initiative. By doing so, we aim to close the gap between insights and action and help organizations to effectively use process mining to realize process improvements.