- Point of view
Process mining and AI: Reveal better ways to do business
How Genpact and Celonis redesign processes across every industry
Everyone knows technology can improve business processes. It's why legacy systems are continually replaced. But many processes run on a variety of systems, so it's hard to get an end-to-end view of operations. Without this view, it can be difficult to know where to start your transformation.
Thankfully, process mining – a key component of process intelligence – can help. It bridges the gap between disparate underlying systems and the people wanting to transform a process. In short, it gives the end-to-end view that business leaders crave.
Celonis is a leader in process mining and Genpact is one of its platinum partners. Blending Genpact's AI accelerators with Celonis' process mining expertise means that together, we can reveal how processes run, how to simplify them, and how to build future-proof operations.
Here are some examples of how process mining and artificial intelligence are being used in the enterprise:
If you're keen to explore the potential of process mining and AI, we have some advice to keep in mind.
Process mining and AI in action
Challenge: A leading research-based pharmaceutical company needed to free up working capital to fund research and development (R&D). However, its data was disparate. As a result, its operations teams spent a lot of time and effort manually identifying the reasons behind inefficient cash flow.
Solution: Genpact and Celonis used process mining to analyze payment patterns and identified early payments as one of the main reasons behind working capital issues. We discovered that the company pays 11% of invoices early – some with good reason, some without. We then used an AI model to identify the invoices that were paid early without a valid reason.
Impact: Problematic early payments were investigated, analyzed, and shared with the operations team to stop them in their tracks. This unique and automated solution helped to improve cash flow by around $12.7 million and saved many weeks of manual effort. Now, the company has the capital it needs for R&D.
Challenge: A beverage company was struggling to avoid duplicate invoice payments. Visibility was an issue as many of its invoices were processed through external third-party tools. This lack of control meant the operations team spent a huge amount of time and resources manually checking for duplicates and recovering the payments.
Solution: Genpact and Celonis worked together to bring process intelligence to the invoice process. We automated the process of checking for duplicate invoices across multiple systems. Powered by AI, the solution identifies and prevents duplicate payments before they happen.
Impact: Our bespoke solution improved working capital by around $1 million and saved the operations team many months of manual effort. Better still, the solution is future-proof and ready to grow with the business.
Of course, the hottest AI topic is generative AI – a subset of artificial intelligence that generates text, images, audio, video, and code using large deep learning models. As this technology is still in its infancy, the benefits of introducing gen AI into process mining are still to be seen.
However, we expect generative AI will empower users to perform their own interactive chat-based analysis of problematic processes. This means they can self-serve to explore root causes and uncover recommendations for improvement. This analysis will be based on predefined business models and process query language (PQL). This analysis can then be shared as business reports with stakeholders.
In parallel, generative AI will likely be used by data analysts to generate PQL queries that can be stored, customized, and reused based on business needs – dramatically accelerating the time it takes to deploy solutions like Celonis. But it will be those who act first that will define what the future of these technologies looks like.
You might be raring to get started with process mining, but remember – technology is nothing without the people who introduce it, train it, and manage it. You need a partner with deep functional and industry expertise to turn business process transformation from a vision into reality.
Authored by Manish Gupta, Global Process Mining Leader, Genpact