• English
  • Português
  • About Us
  • Product
  • Process Mining
  • Solutions
  • Contents
Menu
  • About Us
  • Product
  • Process Mining
  • Solutions
  • Contents
CONTACT

BI VS PROCESS MINING: THE MAIN DIFFERENCES – Part 1

  • EverFlow
  • August 12, 2020
  • No Comments
BI vs Process Mining

Is it Process Mining just like a specialized sort of BI?

People often ask me this. Though a common question, to me, it sounds just as weird as: “isn’t a unicorn just a type of pony?”.

Well ponies and unicorns do look alike, just like BI and Process Mining do. But they are all different beasts.

I won’t go over the difference between ponies and unicorns… I will leave that to my young daughter

BI and Process Mining certainly share their resemblances:

  • Both are analytical tools that try to depict reality from underlying data
  • Both usually have capabilities to slice and dice data, to help correlate information and drill-down to specifics
  • Both tend to be graphical and flirt with or use machine learning/AI for more advanced analysis

However, two fundamental things tell Process Mining apart from BI:

  • A predefined model: in process mining data takes the format of events, which usually present at least 3 pieces of information: a timestamp, a case id and an activity name. The mere existence of these pieces of info allows process mining to perform functionalities such as Play-In (discovery), Play-out (simulation) and Replay. They also enable inferring process models, performing automated conformance analysis and process simulation. All these things are rarely found in BI solutions.
  • End-to-End visibility: the very philosophy of entangling events into cases lead to an end-to-end view of processes. This avoids partial, sometimes biased, analysis of data, that don’t tell all the story about the underlying processes nor the context of the business. It is this inherent end-to-end property found in process mining that makes it so appealing to automation and digital transformation projects.

In which context to use each of the technologies?

Does that mean process mining can do anything a BI does and more? Not exactly. If the input data does not look like events, it is very likely that a BI tool will outperform Process Mining in its analysis. Time series oriented data, for example, are hardly Process Mining material, unless some pre-processing is performed to turn it into events or to enrich existing events in other datasets.

All that being said, it is fair to say that Process Mining is more than a BI with a magical horn on its front head. They are different animals and do eventually complement each other.

As a rule of thumb, if your dataset is based on events, and you need to analyze/manage a process, or something that looks like a process (customer journey, for example), you are better served with a Process Mining solution such as EverFlow.

PrevPreviousThe relevance of Process Mining in transformation journeys
NextBI vs Process Mining: Part 2Next
Share:

Leave a comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Latest Posts
  • digital scooter
    Digital Transformation, Automation and Process Mining: Why you should Discover your real process before planning Digital Projects
  • Process Mining Beyond P2P And O2C
    PROCESS MINING BEYOND P2P AND O2C
  • Quality Automation
    Quality Management Automation
  • economia-de-serviços
    Process Mining and IoT in the new Service Economy
  • Gestão de riscos
    Monitor your Risk Management and Conformance with Process Mining

NEWSLETTER

FOLLOW US

Facebook
Linkedin
BOOK A DEMO

EMAIL

info@everflow.ai

BRAZIL

Maria Monteiro 786,
Campinas, SP

USA

2 Embarcadero Center, 8th Floor,
San Francisco, CA 94111

about us

Everflow mixes advanced Process Mining and Machine Learning techniques with Big Data and a streamlined User eXperience, to build an innovative, easy to use, platform that anyone can use to analyze and improve its own business and technical processes.
Facebook
Linkedin