process mining - Benelux Intelligence Community

3 items tagged "process mining"

‘Als je wilt overleven als bedrijf móét je ruimte voor Big Data inruimen’

De toekomst van bedrijven hangt af van Big Data aldus Emile Aarts, rector magnificus van de Tilburg University. In een interview met Management Team vertelt de rector magnificus over de typen toepassingen die hij als kansrijk ziet.
Beeld ‘Als je wilt overleven als bedrijf móét je ruimte voor Big Data inruimen’

Zoals Copernicus, Darwin en Freud ons wereldbeeld hebben laten kantelen, zo gaan Big Data dat ook doen. De invloed van Big Data wordt groot, zeer groot, aldus Aarts in het interview.

Process Mining
Een van de voorbeelden die hij noemt is Process Mining. Daarmee is het mogelijk om met ‘event logs’ en andere data in het bedrijf processen in een organisatie in kaart te brengen. Hiermee is te zien hoe het een en ander werkelijk verloopt, in hoeverre men afwijkt van de processen op papier. Procesverbeteringen kunnen daardoor nauwkeuriger en sneller worden doorgevoerd.

Scenario’s
Op de vraag of managers wel leiding kunnen geven aan data deskundigen antwoordt Aarts dat ondernemers en managers wel enig verstand moeten hebben van Big Data en kunstmatige intelligentie. Maar met verstand van Big Data zijn ze er nog niet. “De informatie op basis waarvan zij beslissingen moeten, zal steeds meer worden gevisualiseerd in scenario’s. Daarmee moeten ze dus ook kunnen omgaan, wat voor de manager die het liefste informatie in een spreadsheet heeft nog lastig kan zijn,” aldus Aarts.

Soft skills
Ook worden soft skills voor managers steeds belangrijker. “Mensen kunnen zich onderscheiden door hun empathische vermogen, hun communicatieve vaardigheden en de manier waarop ze anderen kunnen inspireren. Zeker als ze aan jongere mensen leiding willen geven, die wars zijn van hiërarchische structuren en graag werken in bedrijven waar beslissingen in sterke mate collectief worden genomen,” aldus Aarts.

Bron: hrpraktijk.nl, 14 november 2016
Business Intelligence in 3PL: Mining the Value of Data
In today’s business world, “information” is a renewable resource and virtually a product in itself. Business intelligence technology enables businesses to capture historical, current and predictive views of their operations, incorporating such functions as reporting, real-time analytics, data and process mining, performance management, predictive analytics, and more. Thus, information in its various forms and locations possesses genuine inherent value.

In the real world of warehousing, the availability of detailed, up-to-the minute information on virtually every item in the operators’ custody, from inbound dock to delivery site, leads to greater efficiency in every area it touches. Logic would offer that greater profitability ensues.

Three areas of 3PL operations seem to be most benefitted through savings opportunities identified through business intelligence solutions: labor, inventory, and analytics.

In the first case, business intelligence tools can help determine the best use of the workforce, monitoring its activity in order to assure maximum effective deployment. The result: potentially major jumps in efficiency, dramatic reductions in downtime, and healthy increases in productivity and billable labor.

In terms of inventory management, the metrics obtainable through business intelligence can stem inventory inaccuracies that would have resulted in thousands of dollars in annual losses, while also reducing write-offs.

Analytics through business intelligence tools can also accelerate the availability of information, as well as provide the optimal means of presentation relative to the type of user. One such example is the tracking of real-time status of work load by room or warehouse areas; supervisors can leverage real-time data to re-assign resources to where they are needed in order to balance workloads and meet shipping times. A well-conceived business intelligence tool can locate and report on a single item within seconds and a couple of clicks.

Extending the Value

The value of business intelligence tools is definitely not confined to the product storage areas.

With automatically analyzed information available in a dashboard presentation, users – whether in the office or on the warehouse floor – can view the results of their queries/searches in a variety of selectable formats, choosing the presentation based on its usefulness for a given purpose. Examples:
- Status checks can help identify operational choke points, such as if/when/where an order has been held up too long; if carrier wait-times are too long; and/or if certain employees have been inactive for too long.
- Order fulfillment dashboards can monitor orders as they progress through the picking, staging and loading processes, while also identifying problem areas in case of stalled processes.
- Supervisors walking the floor with handheld devices can both encourage team performance and, at the same time, help assure efficient dock-side activity. Office and operations management are able to monitor key metrics in real-time, as well as track budget projections against actual performance data.
- Customer service personnel can call up business intelligence information to assure that service levels are being maintained or, if not, institute measures to restore them.
- And beyond the warehouse walls, sales representatives in the field can access mined and interpreted data via mobile devices in order to provide their customers with detailed information on such matters as order fill rates, on-time shipments, sales and order volumes, inventory turnover, and more.
Thus, well-designed business intelligence tools not only can assemble and process both structured and unstructured information from sources across the logistics enterprise, but can deliver it “intelligently” – that is, optimized for the person(s) consuming it. These might include frontline operators (warehouse and clerical personnel), front line management (supervisors and managers), and executives.

The Power of Necessity

Chris Brennan, Director of Innovation at Halls Warehouse Corp., South Plainfield N.J., deals with all of these issues as he helps manage the information environment for the company’s eight facilities. Moreover, as president of the HighJump 3PL User Group, he strives to foster collective industry efforts to cope with the trends and issues of the information age as it applies to warehousing and distribution.

“Even as little as 25 years ago, business intelligence was a completely different art,” Brennan has noted. “The tools of the trade were essentially networks of relationships through which members kept each other apprised of trends and happenings. Still today, the power of mutual benefit drives information flow, but now the enormous volume of data available to provide intelligence and drive decision making forces the question: Where do I begin?”

Brennan has taken a leading role in answering his own question, drawing on the experience and insights of peers as well as the support of HighJump’s Enterprise 3PL division to bring Big Data down to size:

“Business intelligence isn’t just about gathering the data,” he noted, “it’s about getting a group of people with varying levels of background and comfort to understand the data and act upon it. Some managers can glance at a dashboard and glean everything they need to know, but others may recoil at a large amount of data. An ideal BI solution has to relay information to a diverse group of people and present challenges for them to think through.”

source: logisticviewpoints.com, December 6, 2016
IBM expands in automation with the acquisition of MyInvenio

IBM expands in automation with the acquisition of MyInvenio

IBM could use MyInvenio's process mining platform to direct its customers to its automation and AI portfolio, a practice that other technology vendors are using.

IBM will acquire process mining vendor MyInvenio in a bid to further build out the technology giant's automation portfolio.

The acquisition, made public on April 15, builds on an existing partnership between IBM and MyInvenio. Since December of last year, IBM has integrated MyInvenio's process mining and task mining technology into IBM Cloud Pak for Automation, a platform for building and running automation applications.

Expanding the automation portfolio

IBM's acquisition of the myInvenio, which is based in Reggio Emilia, Italy, gives IBM the chance to integrate MyInvenio technology more deeply into its Cloud Pak for Automation platform, said Neil Ward-Dutton, vice president of IDC's intelligent business execution practice.

"IBM wants to make the MyInvenio technology a seamless part of its automation platform, and wants to add process mining, analytics and optimization from MyInvenio as core parts of its business and IT automation proposition," he said.

MyInvenio's platform automatically analyzes users' business data to identify tasks that could benefit from automation and surface bottlenecks and other inefficiencies that users could improve. Its technology can analyze user interaction data to determine where robotic process automation (RPA) bots and other automation could benefit its users.

MyInvenio's technology could complement IBM's existing automation platform in a few ways, including by helping clients identify opportunities to automate with RPA or automate the generation of business rules, Ward-Dutton said.

"Longer term, MyInvenio's technology could also be used to provide a kind of ongoing operational insight capabilities for business, IT and network management processes, highlighting potential problems and proactively suggesting fixes," he added.

For IBM, an obvious choice is to integrate output from MyInvenio with IBM Blueworks Live, a cloud-based business process modeler, so that analysis could move directly into a modeling and documentation tool for process reengineering, said Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz.

"This can be done today by importing a BPMN (business process model and notation) model, but it will likely become more tightly integrated and easier to use," he added.

RPA and process mining

IBM's acquisition of MyInvenio builds on IBM's acquisition of Brazilian RPA vendor WDG Automation in July. At the time, IBM said it planned to integrate more than 600 prebuilt RPA functions from WDG Automation into its Cloud Pak products, beginning with Cloud Pak for Automation.

IBM's move with MyInvenio "totally builds on IBM's automation strategy, including, but not exclusive to, RPA," Koplowitz said. "Once automation is determined to be the right approach to optimize a process, easy provisioning of technology streamlines the process and directs a customer to IBM's tech stack."

Koplowitz added that he's concerned, though, that process mining is "increasingly becoming a feeder for a presumed automation solution."

So, with process mining, an enterprise using the technology could surface where automation could be useful, which in turn would provide the vendor -- in this case, IBM -- with opportunities to sell more services to automate that process.

"The automation market is much larger than the process mining market, so anything that can help a vendor feed that beast becomes compelling [to them]," he said.

The industry saw that, to a certain extent, with UiPath's acquisition of ProcessGold, a process mining vendor based in the Netherlands, and with SAP's acquisition of Signavio earlier this year, Koplowitz noted. Now, with MyInvenio, IBM is making a similar move.

Still, MyInvenio might be one of a few automation acquisitions IBM makes in the short term.

Ward-Dutton noted that IBM aims to build out the broadest possible automation platform. He said it wouldn't surprise him if the tech giant made one or two more acquisitions to this platform in the coming year or so.

IBM did not disclose the financial details of its MyInvenio deal.

Author: Mark Labbe

Source: TechTarget