Introduction

  • 8 minutes

In today’s fast-paced business environment, understanding and improving your organizational processes isn’t helpful—it’s essential. This is where process mining comes in. It combines data analysis with process discovery to help you reach operational excellence.

Imagine being able to explore your business workflows, pinpoint inefficiencies, and uncover areas for improvement. That’s exactly what process mining enables. By analyzing the data your systems already generate, process mining helps identify bottlenecks, deviations, and opportunities to optimize your operations. These insights help you take meaningful steps toward improving your key performance indicators (KPIs).

How Process Mining Works

Process mining extracts data from event logs within your systems to visually map out your actual business processes. This allows you to see what’s really happening in your operations—not just how they were designed to function.

Diagram showing a process map.

By analyzing this data, process mining gives you a clear picture of how work flows through your organization. It helps you:

  • Improve operational efficiency
    Spot slowdowns or repetitive steps that reduce productivity.

  • Enhance customer experience
    Eliminate friction points in your workflows to better serve customers.

  • Optimize resource usage
    Find opportunities to automate tasks and allocate resources more effectively.

  • Ensure compliance
    Detect and address deviations from regulations or internal standards.

  • Improve supply chain performance
    Help logistics and warehouse managers better understand material flow.

Real-World Examples

  • Finance: Monitor compliance with regulatory changes and reduce risk.
  • Manufacturing: Identify delays or downtime in production.
  • Customer Service: Standardize workflows to reduce rework and backlog.

Process mining helps businesses address critical challenges, improve day-to-day operations, and stay competitive.

Process Mining in Power Automate

Microsoft Power Automate includes powerful process mining and task mining features to help you understand and optimize your business processes.

  • Process mining is ideal for analyzing organization-wide workflows using event logs.
  • Task mining is best for observing how users complete tasks on their desktops, using data like clicks and keystrokes.

Diagram of process mining and task mining.

Together, these tools provide a complete view of how your business functions—from individual actions to enterprise-wide processes. This module focuses on process mining.

Power Automate makes it easy to:

  • Collect and visualize process data
  • Create detailed process maps
  • Analyze workflows
  • Spot automation opportunities

Screenshot showing a process report inside the desktop application.

You can also dig deeper with features like root cause analysis (RCA) to uncover hidden patterns and connections within your workflows.

Screenshot of root cause analysis.

What’s Next

In the rest of this module, you’ll learn key concepts of process mining and how to apply these insights using Power Automate.