What is Process Intelligence?
Explore the definition, benefits, and use cases of process intelligence
Introduction
As the saying goes, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” That’s why process intelligence is an important foundation for any organization’s continuous business process management and improvement efforts.
Business processes have become more complex. Organizations around the globe are finding that a combination of legacy technologies, multiple point solutions, human work, and diverse endpoints is creating process complexity that prevents a holistic view into business process performance from end to end across customer journeys. Process intelligence helps organizations visualize process performance to improve tasks and processes critical to customer journeys and strategic goals.
What is process intelligence?
Process intelligence, also called business process intelligence, uses data, analytics, and automation tools to monitor, analyze, and optimize the health and performance of business processes.
With process intelligence, organizations have real-time visibility into process execution data and analytical insights that help improve workflows, operate more efficiently, and enhance overall operational performance.
Leaders agree: Organizations need process intelligence
In response to our most recent State of Process Orchestration Survey, leaders told us there is room for improvement in the following areas:
97% Improving business-critical processes
96% Defining organizational, value-based metrics to support cost savings, better compliance, and growth
96% Understanding how processes drive organizational value
Process intelligence helps tackle those challenges.
Benefits of process intelligence
At the highest level, process intelligence helps organizations understand the value of their end-to-end processes and drive operational excellence through data-driven insights.
When leaders and project stakeholders have visibility into value-based measurements of their process automations and how these process automations perform across the entire customer journey, they are better equipped to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and opportunities for improvement. They are also empowered with information that can help them align and refine business processes to company goals and strategic objectives.
Organizations are benefitting from process intelligence in multiple ways. The main benefits of process intelligence include:
Continuous improvement
Process intelligence enables an ongoing cycle of continuous process improvements through feedback loops and tracking and implemented changes.
Enhanced collaboration and faster decision-making
Shared visibility into process data improves collaboration between Business and IT and empowers stakeholders at all levels to quickly respond to issues and contribute to process improvements.
Increased operational and cost efficiencies
Process intelligence data and insights bring visibility to process inefficiencies, redundancies, and non-value-added tasks, enabling stakeholders to better allocate resources to streamline tasks, processes, workflows, and end-to-end journeys.
Improved compliance and risk management
Real-time data allows managers to monitor adherence to internal and external policies, regulations, and standards, flag potential issues for action, and create auditable reports.
Improved customer and employee experiences
By optimizing onboarding, service delivery, and other customer-related processes, organizations can improve both customer experiences and employee satisfaction.
Building strategic business value
Process intelligence brings visibility to data and insights that help leaders target improvements for mission-critical automations. It provides a data-centric foundation for building roadmaps towards greater, strategic business value.
Having visibility into your business processes helps you take ownership of your business outcomes and the actions needed to improve them.
How does process intelligence work?
Process intelligence uses multiple capabilities to deliver actionable data and insights. Every automated business process generates process execution data through sources like event logs, transactions, and APIs. Process intelligence applications gather the process data, aggregate it, analyze it, and repackage it into business reporting dashboards that allow users to see the reality of what’s working with a process and what needs improvement.
A hallmark of process intelligence tools is the ability to view valuable data at a glance. This is done through descriptive reporting dashboards. Some process intelligence tools allow users to create customized reporting dashboards to more easily track data such as automation rates, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and specific organizational goals. Reported data might include timestamps, process flows, user actions, process exceptions, cycle times, throughput, bottlenecks, and process patterns, among other metrics.
Dashboards vary and may include charts, graphs, maps, analyses, alerts, and filters that allow users to quickly and easily understand how processes perform in real-time and over time.
Benchmarks
Report on KPIs
Monitoring
Target values
Analysis
Identify opportunities
Evaluation
Observe over time
What is the difference between process mining and process intelligence?
Process mining
Uses system and event log data and process mapping to reconstruct process flows. It provides an objective view of how a process actually operates compared to planned operation. Process mining tools can monitor processes and generate alerts when processes deviate from their planned operations. It’s also an important component of process intelligence.
Process intelligence
- Automation
- Process Mining
- Data Analysis
- Machine Learning
- Predictive Analytics
While process mining provides a critical foundation by revealing your as-is processes, process intelligence can suggest improvements for the to-be processes that can help you transform your organization and achieve your strategic goals.
Process intelligence use cases
Examples of broad use cases for process intelligence
Business reporting
Establishing, measuring, and reporting against specific KPIs, such as customer wait time and service level agreements (SLAs); creating custom alerts.
Operational efficiency
Monitoring end-to-end automations and human tasks; reporting on data such as automation rates, process bottlenecks, cycle times, and demand spikes; continuous monitoring and process improvement.
Strategic improvement
Analyzing historical process performance and non-linear processes; analyzing potential impacts of new implementations to existing processes; using machine learning and analytics to mitigate risk and suggest process opportunities that align with strategic imperatives.
Organizations across industries use process intelligence to monitor and improve business processes
Banking & Financial Services
- Regulatory Compliance / Audit Readiness
- Fraud Detection and Prevention
- Customer Onboarding
- Financial Transaction Processing
- Loan and Credit Processing
- Back-Office Operations
Read how financial services onboarding platform QuickSign uses process intelligence to maintain its high availability, robust processes, and regulatory compliance.
Insurance
- Claims Processing Optimization
- Underwriting Efficiency
- Customer Onboarding / Policy Issuance
- Policy Renewals / Churn Analysis
- Regulatory Compliance / Audit Preparation
- Back-Office Process Efficiency
Find out how insurer Wertgarantie uses process intelligence to track KPIs, streamline processes, and reinforce its commitment to efficient and sustainable operations.
Public Sector
- Digital Transformation
- Citizen Services Delivery Optimization
- Automated Compliance Checks
- Real-Time Data Tracking
- Health and Safety Monitoring
- Work Cycle Time Reduction
- Fraud and Waste Prevention
- Grant and Fund Disbursement Compliance
See how the United Kingdom’s Register Office (UK GRO) uses actionable data from process intelligence to identify and solve service gaps.
Telecommunications
- Network Operations and Monitoring
- Call Center Efficiency
- Order Fulfillment and Activation
- Billing Error Detection
- Fraud Detection
- Network Capacity Planning
- Product and Service Rollouts
- Regulatory Compliance Monitoring
Read how Openreach Limited (a subsidiary of British Telecom Group) uses process intelligence to enable rapid innovation.
How does process intelligence fit within a hyperautomation tech stack?
Process intelligence helps maintain visibility into and control of an enterprise hyperautomation tech stack by analyzing process flows and identifying inefficiencies that could be eliminated or improved through automation. It’s like having an always-on, strategic lens into your IT ecosystem.
The data collected and output created through process intelligence helps IT leaders analyze, understand, troubleshoot, and improve task automation. It also helps IT leaders pinpoint and prioritize which technologies should be replaced. And when integrated with RPA and AI-based systems, IT leaders have the benefit of combining detailed information about every task and automation that is executed as part of a process with intelligence from AI-based tools to better understand the context and interdependencies of each business process. This gives leaders a holistic view of processes across the enterprise and helps accelerate the improvement of workflows.
Why you need a process intelligence platform even if you already have a data warehouse and other business intelligence tools in your hyperautomation stack:
In the world of low-code projects driven by business teams, your business intelligence needs to be tightly integrated with your processes. Connecting low-code initiatives to existing data warehouses can be clunky, and updating disparate business intelligence reports can be cumbersome.
That’s why process intelligence is valuable — it’s a centralized capability that adds the context traditional business intelligence tools often miss. Process intelligence dashboards don’t just display data; they highlight opportunities for improvement and give stakeholders a clear, visual way to get aligned before launching any optimization efforts.
The role of process intelligence in process orchestration
Process orchestration coordinates the people, systems, devices, and AI for business processes from end to end across an organization to streamline operations and achieve intended outcomes. Because business processes are constantly adapting to market changes, new business needs, and evolving technologies, maintaining a holistic view of performance across all processes is critical for effective management. Process intelligence is the centralized tool that provides the operational insights organizations need to continuously improve.
- Understand business impact
- Continually optimize processes
- Make strategic process orchestration decisions
Getting started with process intelligence
Camunda makes it easy to add process intelligence insights to your operations using Camunda Optimize, a cloud-native process intelligence platform that gathers and reports on data from Camunda and non-Camunda automation projects.
Camunda Optimize and process intelligence
Use Camunda Optimize as a central analytical tool for viewing and managing business processes. Its open architecture allows you to integrate Optimize’s process intelligence with your existing reporting capabilities to create relevant, custom, shareable insights.
Camunda Optimize empowers you to:
- Visualize and monitor data all of your process data through one, central tool
- Improve collaboration between Business and IT
- Streamline complex work and improve business outcomes
- Make better strategic decisions that align with organization goals and objectives
Read the blog post, Improving Process Intelligence with Camunda Optimize, and learn how to build process intelligence reports that keep you on track toward your goals.
