What Is Process Mining? Let’s Talk About It

Let’s be honest, process mining probably sounds like another piece of corporate jargon. Right? It’s the kind of term that gets thrown around in boardrooms, but what does it actually do? Well, at its heart, it’s a way to get a perfectly honest, data-driven replay of how your business really works. Think of it as a super-smart CCTV camera for your internal workflows. But less creepy.

So, What Is Process mining, Really?

You almost certainly have a clear picture in your head of how things are supposed to run. It’s likely a clean, elegant flowchart where a customer order comes in, gets processed, and sails out the door. It’s neat. It’s tidy. And it’s probably wrong.

What’s really happening on the ground?

That’s where the frustration sets in. You can feel the delays. You hear whispers about the strange workarounds your team has invented just to get the job done. But you can’t quite put your finger on where the process is actually breaking down. It’s like trying to find a single dropped stitch in a massive, tangled quilt. You know it’s there… but finding it feels impossible.

Process mining is the tool that finds that stitch for you.

It doesn’t rely on subjective interviews or outdated process maps. Instead, it taps directly into the digital breadcrumbs your systems, like a CRM, ERP, or finance platform, are already creating every second of the day.

Turning Digital Footprints into a Clear Map

Every time an employee updates a customer record, approves an invoice, or moves a task to the next stage, they leave behind a digital footprint. These footprints are collected in what’s called an event log, which typically contains three critical pieces of information:

Case ID: A unique identifier, like an order number or customer ID.
Activity: The specific action that took place (e.g., “Invoice Approved”).
Timestamp: The exact date and time the activity happened.

Process mining software takes millions of these individual footprints and pieces them all together. It’s a lot like assembling a complex puzzle.

The result? You’re no longer looking at a theoretical flowchart. You’re seeing a real, living map of your process, complete with all its messy detours, unexpected loops, and hidden bottlenecks. It’s the unvarnished truth. Based on cold, hard data.

It shows you what is, not what you think should be. This is the fundamental shift. It moves your entire organisation from guesswork to evidence-based decisions, exposing the inefficiencies that have been slowing you down all along.

This data-driven map doesn’t just show the “happy path.” It highlights every single variation and deviation. You might discover that 30% of your purchase orders take a strange detour for a manual check that isn’t even part of the official procedure. Or you might find that a specific team is a major bottleneck because they handle a key task differently to everyone else.

It’s these kinds of “aha!” moments that make process mining such a game changer. You can finally stop guessing and start fixing the real world problems that are costing you time, money, and maybe even a few sleepless nights.

How Process Mining Uncovers the Real Story

So, how does this all actually work? It’s not magic, but it does feel a bit like having X-ray vision for your business operations.

Think about your company’s daily activities for a moment. Every single action that happens inside your software… every click, every form submission, every approval… leaves a tiny digital footprint. You might not see them, but they’re there: a timestamp, a case ID, an activity name. They’re like digital breadcrumbs scattered across your systems.

Process mining software is designed to gather all these scattered breadcrumbs, which are formally known as event logs, directly from the systems you already use, like your CRM or ERP.

Once it has the data, the software starts piecing the breadcrumbs together in the right order. It’s a bit like assembling a complex puzzle without the picture on the box, but the software is incredibly good at it. It follows the unique ID for each case, tracing its journey from beginning to end.

And just like that, you have it. A complete, visual map showing every single path a process takes, from the standard, by-the-book route to all the messy, unexpected detours you never even knew existed.

From Raw Data to a Real Story

Let’s make this more concrete. Imagine you run an e-commerce store, and we’re looking at your order fulfilment process. On paper, it should be simple: Order Placed -> Payment Confirmed -> Goods Packed -> Shipped. Easy.

But what the event logs actually show is something… different.

The process mining tool pulls together thousands of these data points and builds a visual map. This schematic shows the basic idea: event logs from your systems are fed into the tool, which then discovers the real process, checks it for compliance, and gives you the insights to improve it.

What you’re seeing here is the transformation from scattered data points into a clear, actionable process model. The software doesn’t just show you one ideal path; it shows you all of them, in all their glorious inefficiency.

Suddenly, instead of that neat four-step process, you see the truth:

20% of orders bounce from ‘Payment Confirmed’ back to ‘Order Placed’ because of a recurring payment gateway issue.
A surprising number of orders get stuck in a ‘Manual Fraud Check’ loop for days, a bottleneck you didn’t realise was happening so often.
You spot a huge delay between ‘Goods Packed’ and ‘Shipped’, but only for orders leaving your Sydney warehouse on a Friday afternoon.

This is what we mean by uncovering the real story. It’s not about abstract dashboards or high-level numbers. It’s about seeing the exact, concrete steps where things are breaking down.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

Having this kind of objective view is a genuine game changer. You’re no longer relying on what people think happens or what that dusty old process document claims. You’re seeing the cold, hard facts, pulled directly from your own systems.

This isn’t just about finding problems; it’s about understanding them with incredible precision. Knowing why things are delayed allows you to make targeted fixes. It helps you move from constantly fighting fires to actually preventing them from starting in the first place.

Process mining turns your data from a passive, historical record into an active, strategic guide. For the first time, you can manage your processes based on reality, not theory.

This data-driven approach is fundamental to any meaningful improvement. Understanding the strategic importance of effective data analysis, such as for wider initiatives in business process optimization, highlights why tools like process mining are becoming so indispensable. It provides the hard evidence you need to make smart, impactful changes that genuinely improve how your business runs. You’re not just guessing anymore; you’re diagnosing. And that makes all the difference.

The Three Lenses of Process Mining

So, you’ve grasped the core idea. Process mining isn’t just about drawing a pretty flowchart; it’s about getting a brutally honest look at how your business actually operates day-to-day. But once you have that realistic picture, what comes next?

This is where things get really interesting. Process mining isn’t a one-trick pony. It gives you different ‘lenses’ to view your operations through, and each one provides a unique kind of insight.

Think of it like a photographer’s toolkit. You wouldn’t use a wide-angle lens for a detailed close-up, and you wouldn’t use a portrait lens for a sweeping landscape. It’s the same with process mining. There are three main techniques, or lenses, and knowing which one to use is the key to unlocking real value.

Lens 1: The Discovery Map

This is the classic we’ve been talking about and the starting point for almost any process mining initiative. Process discovery is the lens you use when you genuinely need to see what’s going on under the hood.

Imagine trying to map an unfamiliar river system. You wouldn’t just draw a straight line from the mountains to the sea, would you? You’d get in a helicopter, fly over the entire area, and trace every single twist, turn, and tributary.

That’s precisely what discovery does. It takes all those raw event logs from your systems and, without any preconceived notions, it draws the map for you. The result is often… surprising. It reveals the real process flow, not the one written down in a procedure manual five years ago. This is where you find those big ‘aha!’ moments.

Lens 2: The Conformance Check

Once you have your real world map, the next lens is all about comparison. Conformance checking is like holding your ideal, designed process map right next to the real one that the software just discovered.

It’s a bit like a game of ‘spot the difference’.

The software automatically highlights every single deviation. Every time a step was skipped, an unapproved shortcut was taken, or the process looped back on itself unexpectedly, it gets flagged. This is incredibly powerful for a few reasons:

Compliance: You can instantly see where your team isn’t following mandatory regulatory steps. No more hoping for the best during an audit.
Training Gaps: If a particular team consistently deviates from the standard process, it might not be rebellion. It could be a clear sign they need better training.
Process Flaws: Sometimes, the ‘shortcuts’ people take are actually smarter than the official process. Conformance checking helps you spot these organic improvements so you can make them standard practice.

It’s not about catching people out. It’s about understanding the gap between the process you designed and the process your people live every single day.

This is where you can see the direct link between process insights and tangible business benefits like greater efficiency, lower costs, and improved compliance.

As you can see, understanding these deviations directly leads to major improvements across the board. In fact, studies show process mining can improve compliance by up to 30%.

Lens 3: The Enhancement Overlay

This third lens, often called enhancement or performance mining, is where it gets really clever. This is where you move from just seeing your process to actively improving it.

The enhancement lens takes your real process map and overlays it with other business data. You’re no longer just looking at the path of the process; you’re seeing how that path performs. For example, you can overlay:

Time: See exactly how long is spent between each step, instantly revealing your biggest bottlenecks.
Cost: Assign a cost to each activity to see where your process is leaking money.
Resources: Analyse which teams or individuals are involved at each stage to understand workloads and spot automation opportunities.

It’s like switching from a standard road map to a satellite map with a live traffic feed. You don’t just see the roads; you see the traffic jams, the accidents, and the clear routes. This is what gives you the specific, targeted insights needed to make intelligent, data-driven changes that actually work.

Process Mining Techniques Compared

To put it all together, here’s a simple breakdown of how these three techniques differ and where they shine.

Technique	Main Goal	Best Used For
Discovery	To create an “as-is” model of the real process from event data.	Situations where the actual process is unknown, undocumented, or poorly understood.
Conformance Checking	To compare the real process against a pre-defined “to-be” model.	Auditing, compliance checks, and identifying where and why deviations occur.
Enhancement	To enrich the process model with performance data (e.g., time, cost).	Identifying bottlenecks, finding inefficiencies, and pinpointing areas for optimisation.

Ultimately, these three lenses aren’t mutually exclusive. A typical process mining project will start with Discovery, move to Conformance to find the gaps, and then use Enhancement to figure out how to close those gaps and make the process better.

Why Australian Businesses Are Embracing This Shift

This whole process mining movement isn’t just some abstract global trend happening ‘over there’. It’s taking root right here in Australia, and local businesses are catching on fast. Really fast.

Why? Well, you know how it is. Our market is tough and intensely competitive. Efficiency isn’t just a nice-to-have anymore; it’s a matter of survival. We can’t afford to just work harder, we’ve got to start working smarter.

The Aussie Imperative for Smarter Operations

Think about our unique industrial landscape for a moment. We’re not just talking about typical office workflows. From the massive mining operations in the west to the incredibly complex supply chains connecting our cities, our core industries are practically crying out for this kind of insight.

We have bustling financial services centres in Sydney and Melbourne, each handling millions of transactions daily. We have healthcare systems striving to deliver better patient outcomes under constant pressure. In every single one of these fields, guesswork just doesn’t cut it.

That’s what’s driving this shift. It’s a move away from relying on gut feelings and towards using the hard data that’s already sitting inside our systems.

It’s about finally getting a true, honest picture of what’s happening on the ground. Not the idealised version from a three-year-old PowerPoint slide, but the real, messy, day-to-day reality.

This isn’t just another tech upgrade. It’s a fundamental change in how we manage our businesses. We’re talking about untangling logistics nightmares between Perth and Brisbane, or streamlining customer service in our major banks to cut down those frustrating wait times. It’s about making our hospitals run just that little bit smoother, which can make a world of difference.

The Numbers Tell the Story

And if you’re wondering just how serious this is, the numbers are pretty staggering. This isn’t just a few early adopters dipping their toes in the water. The process mining software market in Australia is experiencing extraordinary growth.

Revenues are expected to jump from around USD 5.3 million to an incredible USD 96.6 million by 2030. That’s a compound annual growth rate of nearly 64%. This explosive growth shows that Aussie businesses aren’t just curious; they’re actively investing to find a real competitive edge. To get a deeper sense of this market momentum, you can explore the full findings on Australian process mining growth.

Seeing Process Mining in Action

Theory is one thing, but seeing how this stuff works in the real world is where it really clicks. So, let’s talk about what process mining looks like when the rubber meets the road.

Take a major Australian mining company as an example. Their “pit-to-port” logistics chain is astonishingly complex. It involves dozens of systems, hundreds of staff, and colossal machinery. By using process mining, they can pull all the scattered data from their logistics software, vehicle sensors, and scheduling platforms into one coherent picture.

Suddenly, the fog clears. They might spot that a single haulage route consistently adds a 20-minute delay to every single cycle. On its own, that might not sound like a catastrophe. But when you multiply it across an entire fleet running 24/7, it easily adds up to millions of dollars in lost productivity each year. That’s a highly specific, costly bottleneck they would never have caught by staring at a spreadsheet.

From Mining Haulage to Home Loans

This isn’t just a tool for heavy industry, though. The exact same logic applies in just about any sector you can think of.

Consider a large retail bank trying to speed up its home loan application process. Everyone agrees they want faster approvals, but where are the actual hold-ups? Process mining can dive deep into the application system’s event logs to uncover the ground truth.

It might reveal that applications from a particular online channel get stuck for days, simply waiting on a manual verification step that’s often completely redundant. Once you see that laid out clearly, the fix becomes obvious.

Spotting these hidden inefficiencies is the first and most critical step. Once you know exactly where a process is broken, you can start thinking about how to fix it, often with smart automation.

This is where the real value gets unlocked. After uncovering these bottlenecks, process mining gives you a clear roadmap for selecting the right business process automation tools to streamline the whole operation. It stops being a guessing game and becomes a targeted, data-driven strategy.

Real Problems Solved with Real Data

These tangible, industry-specific examples show how process mining solves real, frustrating problems for businesses. It provides concrete answers to those vague but persistent questions like, “Why does everything around here take so long?”

Here are a few more quick-fire examples:

A telecommunications company discovers that a staggering 40% of new customer activations require manual rework, all stemming from a single data entry error made right at the start of the process.
A large hospital identifies that patient discharge times are consistently longest on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, tracing it back to a specific scheduling conflict between two key departments.
An e-commerce retailer finds its returns process takes twice as long for customers in Western Australia and pinpoints a specific courier handover as the root cause.

These aren’t just interesting tidbits; they are actionable insights that lead directly to better performance, lower costs, and happier customers. In fact, the clarity gained from process mining often builds the perfect business case for exploring business process automation to permanently solve these recurring issues.

Process mining is fast becoming an indispensable part of the Australian mining sector’s digital evolution. Projections show that by 2025, over 60% of Australian mines will have implemented AI-driven solutions for safety and efficiency, with process mining being a key component. The adoption of these tools is expected to boost operational productivity by up to 25%, effectively turning small data points into significant financial gains.

Okay, Where Do I Start?

So, you’re intrigued. Maybe even a little excited. The idea of finally lifting the hood and seeing what’s really happening in your business is a powerful one. But then comes the inevitable next thought… where on earth do you even begin?

It can feel pretty daunting. You’re probably picturing massive projects, complex software, and months tied up in meetings.

Let’s just pause right there. The first step isn’t to go out and buy the flashiest, most expensive software on the market. It’s much simpler than that. Honestly. It all starts with a single conversation.

Pick One Pain Point

Forget about boiling the ocean. Just start by identifying one single process that you know is a headache. Pick one thing that keeps you, or your team, up at night.

Is it your customer onboarding? Does it feel slow and clunky?
What about the way you handle and pay supplier invoices?
Or maybe it’s a specific supply chain workflow that always seems to hit a bottleneck?

Just pick one. Seriously. This is about scoring a quick, tangible win. Having a clear, focused goal is everything. Once you’ve got your target locked in, then you can start thinking about the systems involved. Where does the data for that process actually live?

The goal isn’t to solve every problem at once. It’s to prove the value on a small scale, build momentum, and show everyone what’s possible when you stop guessing and start seeing.

This approach keeps things manageable. You’re not launching a company-wide revolution; you’re just fixing one leaky tap. But fixing that one tap can show everyone the power of having the right tools.

Get the Right People in the Room

Once you’ve zeroed in on your problem process, the next step is to pull together a small, focused team. And I don’t just mean getting a few managers in a room. You absolutely need the people who live and breathe this process every single day.

You need the IT folks who know the systems inside out. They understand where the data is stored and how to get at it. But just as importantly, you need the team members on the frontline, the ones who know all the quirky workarounds and frustrations that never make it into an official report. Their insights are pure gold.

This combination is the secret sauce. It connects the technical data with real world, human experience. To learn more about how crucial this is, check out our insights on the role of automated data processing.

You Don’t Need to Be a Data Scientist

Thankfully, the days of needing a PhD in data science to get your foot in the door are long gone. The technology has become far more accessible, and Australia is actually at the forefront of this shift.

Melbourne-based innovator Apromore is a perfect example. In 2025, it was recognised by Gartner for the third year running as a global leader in the process mining market. Their platform is one of the top three in the world, celebrated for its AI features and no-code approach. This just proves that world class tools are being developed right in our backyard, making it easier than ever for businesses to get started. You can read the full Gartner report on Apromore’s leadership in process mining.

This is all about taking a practical, step-by-step approach. Find a problem, gather a small team, and use today’s accessible tools to get your first win.

Common Questions About Process Mining

You’ve made it this far, so your head is probably buzzing with a few questions. That’s a good sign. It means you’re starting to see the potential. Let’s dig into some of the most common questions that come up when people first start wrapping their heads around process mining.

Is My Data Good Enough to Start?

This is the big one. Almost everyone I talk to worries their data is too messy, too incomplete, or just not ‘right’ for process mining. The fear of having imperfect data can be paralysing.

The good news? You don’t need perfect data. Not even close.

As long as your systems capture those three core ingredients we talked about earlier, a case ID, an activity name, and a timestamp, you have a starting point. Seriously, that’s it. Even patchy data can uncover significant insights. The whole game is about starting with what you have to find that first win, not waiting for a mythical, perfect dataset that will never show up.

How Is This Different from My BI Dashboards?

It’s a great question because, on the surface, they can look similar. Both use data to show you what’s happening in the business, right? But they answer fundamentally different questions.

Think of your Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards like the scoreboard at a footy match. They tell you what happened. You see the final score, key stats, and who kicked the most goals. It’s critical information, for sure, but it doesn’t tell you how the game was actually played.

Process mining is the game replay. It shows you the why behind the score. It visualises the entire flow of play… every pass, every tackle, every unexpected detour… that led to that final result.

BI tells you your average order processing time is 48 hours. Process mining shows you the exact five-step, back-and-forth loop in your approvals workflow that’s causing the delay.

It gets you past the numbers on a screen and down to the root cause of what’s really going on.

How Much Does It Cost to Get Started?

This is the classic “how long is a piece of string?” question, and the honest answer is: it really depends. The cost can vary wildly based on the scale of your project, the complexity of your processes, and the software you choose.

But here’s the important part: the industry has matured, and there are now options for almost every budget.

Open-Source Tools: For teams with technical skills in-house, there are powerful and completely free open-source options that can deliver incredible value.
SaaS Platforms: Many vendors now offer scalable, subscription-based models. This lets you start small with a single process, prove the value, and expand from there.
Enterprise Solutions: For large, company-wide rollouts, you have the comprehensive enterprise platforms with all the bells and whistles you’d expect.

The key takeaway is that you don’t need to jump straight into a massive six-figure investment. You can dip your toe in the water, prove the concept, and build a solid business case for doing more. Understanding your options is the first step, much like how understanding your processes is the first step towards improving them. If you’re already thinking about improvements, you might be interested in our guide on what is business process automation to see how these ideas connect.

At Osher Digital, we help businesses move from seeing problems to actually solving them. If you’re ready to get a true picture of how your operations really work and unlock serious efficiency gains, let’s have a conversation. Discover our approach to tailored automation and AI solutions at https://osher.com.au.

What Is Process Mining? Let's Talk About It