Process Mining vs (BPM) Business Process Management: Why BPM Alone Isn’t Enough

What BPM can’t show you, but process mining can

Business process management (BPM) is the go-to tool for designing structured, standardized workflows, but by itself, it has a blind spot: execution visibility. Once processes are up and running, you need process mining to see what’s really happening in your business.

With process mining, businesses gain:

Process visibility

Processes rarely unfold in real life the way they were originally designed. Yet to make smart real-life decisions, businesses need to know how work happens on the ground.

This is especially true during major organizational shifts that require clear process lead time metrics. As highlighted by EY, a leading consumer healthcare company that needed to separate its consumer goods business from its pharmaceutical division turned to process mining to map its workflows.

The goal was to identify hidden dependencies or potential disruptions to the transition. Teams then streamlined handoffs and minimized process disruptions while untangling operations across departments.

Data-driven decision-making

Without a clear view of how processes actually run, it’s nearly impossible to make informed decisions. Process mining fills that gap.

One Fortune 100 financial institution, for example, used process mining to consolidate data from over 40 systems into a live stream of two million daily event records. This gave the company a real-time view of transaction workflows and pinpointed $6 million in avoidable expenses tied to delays and manual handling.

Integration with real-time process data

Process mining pulls up-to-date information to let businesses see how processes are running at the moment, as well as historically. According to a report by CIO, when the state of Oklahoma set out to audit billions in public spending across 122 agencies, the Office of Management and Enterprise Services (OMES) used process mining to pull live data into a centralized dashboard. The team got visibility into purchase orders and card transactions for real-time oversight over 100% of state spending.

Continuous improvement

Process mining also allows businesses to move from isolated fixes to an ongoing cycle of optimization. The same CIO report, for example, details how Albini & Pitigliani, a global freight and logistics company, used a process mining platform to analyze logs and uncover inefficiencies.

By using real-time KPI dashboards, area managers could view the performance of different traffic types and tweak workflows as needed. Over time, ALPI reduced fulfillment errors by 75% while increasing sales by 15%.

All of these examples required information that BPM alone couldn’t provide: a clear understanding of how work was actually getting done, often uncovered through techniques like root cause analysis and process conformance. Process mining delivers that visibility across industries, whether the goal is saving taxpayer dollars or navigating a complex business separation.

Why BPM and process mining work better together

Process improvement doesn’t stop at designing better workflows, but requires making sure those workflows actually work. As a result, many organizations pair BPM with process mining: BPM lays out the structure, and process mining puts it to the test.

Together, the two technologies help close the gap between planning and execution. Teams can spot smarter improvement and automation opportunities and continue tweaking processes to make them run even better.

ABBYY Timeline: Your end-to-end process intelligence platform

At ABBYY, we’ve spent decades helping enterprises make their processes smarter and faster. Our process intelligence platform ABBYY Timeline combines the power of process mining and task mining to give organizations a clear, data-driven view of how work actually happens.

Timeline goes beyond process mining to offer AI-driven capabilities for process discovery, analysis, monitoring, prediction, and simulation. Watch our 1-minute introduction video to see how this all-in-one approach works. Then start your free trial of ABBYY Timeline or get in touch with one of our experts to experience the value firsthand.