Process Excellence with Process Mining

What does process excellence need to manage?

A process excellence team needs more than a library of diagrams. You need to know who owns each process, whether its required roles are covered, how it is performing, and whether changes follow an approval path.

That information often sits across documents, operational systems, and people’s knowledge. As work changes, documentation can fall behind. Process Mining helps you compare event data with documented processes, while process models give your team a shared reference for roles, approvals, and quality requirements.

What do role coverage and a health score tell you?

Role coverage shows whether a process has the roles it needs, such as a process owner, participants, and people responsible for approvals. It helps you find missing or unclear process responsibilities. It covers process roles, not individual performance.

A health score summarizes a process across five quality dimensions (the CURES framework). It helps you identify processes that may need review, but its value depends on the measures and data behind it. Use the score to guide your investigation, not as a substitute for understanding what is driving the result.

How do you find an ownership or health gap?

Start with a process your team already owns. Review its documented roles and approval points, then compare them with the operational evidence available to you.

You might find that a process has no clearly assigned owner, an approval role is missing from the model, or actual execution differs from the documented path. A health score can also flag a process for review when its KPIs or quality measures fall outside your expectations.

Process Mining helps you investigate deviations, rework, bottlenecks, and cycle-time variation. The findings show you where to focus. Your team decides what to change.

How do you close a gap and keep governance in place?

Use the evidence to agree on a specific change. Update the process model, clarify roles and approval paths, and record the relevant quality requirements and KPIs. Then review the change through your governance process.

You can use Process Simulation to compare proposed scenarios before implementation. Simulation supports decision-making; it does not implement changes or guarantee an outcome.

For a practical framework for ownership and decision rights, see the RACI guide. For broader approval and change-control practices, read the process governance guide.

How does process mining support process excellence?

Process Mining uses event data to show how work runs in practice. You can examine process flows, identify deviations and bottlenecks, and compare operational evidence with documented processes.

This gives your process excellence analyst or consultant a concrete basis for working with process owners and teams. Instead of relying only on interviews or outdated diagrams, you can use available data to investigate where execution differs and which KPIs need attention.

Learn more about Process Mining. For details on how to review process health, see the process health documentation.