In today’s fast-paced business landscape, having a slick and efficient finance function is non-negotiable. But managing financial processes can still often be complex and time-consuming. Process Mining and Task Mining have emerged as powerful tools to streamline operations, boost efficiency, and inform decision-making. In this blog post, we’ll explore these technologies’ applications in revolutionising finance.
Process Mining offers a data-driven view of organisational processes by analysing event logs and digital footprints. It reveals hidden patterns, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies within financial processes. Finance professionals gain visual process representations to identify improvements, optimise workflows, and enhance overall efficiency.
How does it work?
Process and task mining involves extracting data from your finance systems – typically your ERP or finance ledger system and importing it into your process or task mining tool. These tools can then help you create a digital twin of your finance processes, showing you how transactions flow through processes, how and when processes deviate from the expected standard path. This means you can easily see where processes are being blocked, slowed or are not following the standard expected path.
Benefits of Process & Task Mining
- Identifying process inefficiencies: Process Mining tools allow finance professionals to identify process bottlenecks, deviations, and duplications that hinder the smooth operation of financial processes.
- Enhancing compliance and control: Finance functions operate within a highly regulated environment, and adherence to compliance standards is crucial. Process Mining helps to identify compliance gaps, detect deviations, and monitor control points.
- Streamlining financial operations: By analysing process data, Process Mining tools can reveal opportunities for automation, standardisation, and simplification of financial processes.
- Cost reduction and resource allocation: Process Mining helps finance functions identify activities that add little value or consume excessive resources.
- Employee Productivity and Training: Task Mining allows organisations to evaluate employee productivity levels objectively and gain insights into workloads and task distribution. By analysing task data, finance managers can identify training needs and workload imbalances, and ensure equitable distribution of work among team members.
Real-life examples
A global engineering company utilised Process Mining to optimise its order-to-cash process. The organisation identified bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and compliance issues. They were able to reduce order processing time by 50%, improve on-time delivery, and enhance customer satisfaction.
A multinational consumer goods company utilised Process Intelligence to optimise their financial planning and forecasting processes. The organisation gained insights into the accuracy of their forecasts, identified areas for improvement, and enhanced their financial planning capabilities.
A global shipping and logistics company implemented Process Intelligence to optimise their financial risk management processes. By analysing financial data and risk indicators, the organisation gained insights into their risk assessment procedures, identified gaps in risk mitigation, and enhanced their risk management strategies.
A global consumer goods company implemented Process Intelligence to optimise their financial reporting processes. By analysing financial data and transaction flows, the organisation gained insights into the accuracy and timelines of their financial reports.
A multinational technology company implemented Process Intelligence to optimise their financial closing process. By analysing financial data and transaction flows, the organisation gained insights into the efficiency of their closing procedures, identified bottlenecks, and streamlined the process.
Transforming Finance
By embracing these technologies, finance professionals can transform their functions into lean, efficient, and value-added contributors to the organisation’s success using an evidence based approach to process transformation.
Learn more about our Process Intelligence and Automation service here.
