A new business survey from Forrester Consulting shows the growing adoption and importance of process mining, especially for ongoing digital transformation efforts. Process mining, which works by extracting knowledge from event logs readily available in today’s information systems, creates a living X-ray of a business’s processes. It’s used to uncover and monitor hidden inefficiencies in an organization’s processes, such as how invoices and employees are paid, as well as how products are shipped.

According to the survey, 61% of decision makers will use or are evaluating process mining to simplify operations. It shows that process mining is at an inflection point, as many areas where it can drive meaningful change, such as the supply chain and sustainability, are now top boardroom priorities. 

The report’s findings illustrate the scale of the problem that process mining can help solve. For example, only 16% of businesses say they have complete visibility into their processes and just 7% report complete, real-time process visibility. Furthermore, 71% of businesses use ten or more applications to execute a single process and 72% still use manual methods that limit process visibility.

By contrast, it found that 90% of businesses that use process mining technology are confident they’ll hit their process improvement targets this year. The report also found that businesses are struggling to track processes across systems and to make use of new forms of real-time streaming data. Fifty-three percent of businesses report using process visibility data that is more than one day old, while only 56% of decision-makers feel they’re able to incorporate all systems involved into their department’s processes to create an end-to-end view of those processes.

In addition, almost half of the survey participants, 44%, said they are spending more due to lack of process insights. And, 28% of North America respondents are feeling the impact of lower customer satisfaction from process issues, compared to 25% of their EMEA counterparts.

Forrester Consulting surveyed more than 800 decision-makers at global companies for this report.

Read the full report by Forrester Consulting.