Process Mining Demonstrator: Analyze Real Processes | Exasol

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How Process Mining Demonstrator Turns Business Event Data into Clarity

There is a well-known gap in almost every organization. On one side sits the process model – the flowchart that was designed in a workshop, approved by management, documented in the quality handbook, and presented in onboarding training. On the other side sits reality: the day-to-day stream of actual events logged by the systems that support the work. Between those two things is usually a significant distance.

Most of the time, that distance goes unmeasured. Individual team members have a feel for it. Experienced managers know which steps are routinely skipped, which workarounds have quietly become standard practice, which parts of the process slow down without warning when volumes increase. But this knowledge is fragmented, informal, and invisible to the organization as a whole.

The consequences are real. Improvement projects are designed to fix problems described from memory rather than measured with data. Compliance checks compare documentation to documentation rather than documentation to behavior. Automation initiatives are built on the assumption that the process is what it says it is, only to discover after go-live that half the variants were never modeled.

Process mining is the discipline of closing that gap. It takes the event logs your business systems already produce and uses them to reconstruct how work actually flows. Not how it was designed to flow. How it does flow.

Process Mining Demonstrator is a native Mac application that brings process mining capabilities to analysts, managers, and improvement practitioners – without requiring a data science background or a dedicated analytics team. The application is for demonstration or educational purposes only. I am using the application to bring the principle of Process Mining as an additional use case to customers and partners.

The Three Questions Every Business Needs to Answer

Before describing the application’s features, it is worth being precise about the problem structure it is designed for. There are three distinct levels of understanding that organizations need when something in a business process is not performing as expected. They are often confused with each other, and using the wrong tool at the wrong level is one of the most common reasons process improvement work stalls.

Level 1: What?

The first level is detection. Something is wrong, or something has changed. Dashboards exist for this purpose. A set of KPIs displayed with a traffic-light system – green meaning acceptable, amber meaning watch, red meaning act – tells you at a glance what is happening across your operations. Cycle time is red. SLA compliance has dropped to amber. Customer satisfaction has moved from green to amber over the past three weeks.

This level is well served by most business intelligence tools. It is important and necessary, but it has a firm limit: it tells you that something is wrong. It does not tell you why.

Level 2: Why?

The second level is diagnosis. When you see a red KPI on a dashboard, your natural response is to ask: what is going on inside this process that is producing this result? This is the level at which the Process Mining Demonstrator operates.

The data that answers “why” comes from your transactional systems – your ERP, your CRM, your ticketing platform, your order management system. These systems record what happened in business terms: an order was placed, a claim was submitted, a ticket was opened, a payment was processed. They record the business-level steps and when they occurred. Aggregated and analyzed as a process, this data reveals which routes cases are taking, where delays are accumulating, which segments are underperforming, and how the current behavior compares to the intended design.

The drill-down from dashboard to process map is the journey from what to why. When the SLA dashboard turns red, opening the Process Mining Demonstrator and examining the process map for the affected period and segment will show you where in the process time is being lost. The answer is almost never “everywhere” – it is almost always specific to one or two transitions, one or two routes, one or two segments. Making that specificity visible is the purpose of process mining.

Level 3: How?

The third level is the deepest and, in many organizations, the least explored. Once you know why a problem is occurring at the business process level, a further question often remains: how did this actually happen in the systems? At the technical level, step by step, what sequence of events produced this outcome?

Transactional data cannot answer this question. It records business events – coarse-grained, intended, user-initiated milestones. It does not record the system-level...