After the introduction to the Process Mining software landscape, let’s discuss the evolutions in the market, important questions, and the basic pricing elements.
Process mining market evolutions
The process mining landscape has seen a lot of transformations with many acquisitions in the last few years. Process Mining now appears to be maturing as a market and becomes available as a part of major automation platforms. In selecting the right software, it is important to look at the rapid developments and changes in the market.
Underlining the hunger for process mining technologies, many acquisitions happened in the last years. Celonis bought Process Analytics Factory, for better integration with Microsoft’s Power BI analytics platform. Automation Anywhere, the RPA vendor, acquired process mining startups FortressIQ, Process Gold, and StepShot. Blue Prism released a task mining solution called Capture (Task Mining is the technology that allows businesses to capture user interaction or desktop data). Both ABBYY and Kryon have expanded their process mining offerings. SAP bought the German process automation company Signavio in January 2021. This happened just before ServiceNow got into the RPA segment with the buyout of Intellibot.io. IBM acquired process mining software company MyInvenio. And Salesforce bought automation tech provider Servicetrace. In April 2022, Microsoft acquired Minit.
We can see a clear emergence of automation platform vendors offering process mining embedded capabilities and RPA. Why are these business software giants investing so heavily in process mining? We think it is important here to envision what process mining, workflow management, and RPA can achieve together.
What questions should you ask for the selection of the right process mining software?
At OptiMinds, we advise doing an extensive process mining selection approach that requires several important questions.
1. What business processes are you trying to analyze?
Are you focused on analyzing one or more of your core processes, for example, manufacturing, banking, or utilities? Or do your processes incorporate functions like finance, procurement, sales, accounting, or Human Resources? Do you want to focus on your ERP processes, for example, SAP, Oracle, or MS Dynamics? Or other information systems like document capture and archiving? Some vendors have more experience with specific sectors and industries.
2. What do you want to do with those processes?
Are you most interested in evaluating the statistics and activities in your process with process discovery? Or do you want to check if your process is running correctly with conformance checking? Maybe you’re already further in the optimization of your process and want to determine and evaluate possible improvements. There are several options within each of these three process Mining functionalities. Determine what you want to prioritize.
3. What are the functional requirements for your process mining platform?
You will need specific process mining capabilities for collecting the required data, enhancing the data, creating the event log, and analyzing the results in the process mining tool. Typical functions required are IT Administration, Data Science, Business Analysis, Project and Change Management, Process Owner, Security or Privacy Officer.
4. What are the technical requirements?
Given the above, and other aspects of your organization and IT environment, you will have specific technical requirements regarding architecture, performance, and security.
Here are some examples of some important technical considerations:
Architecture
- Is the deployment approach cloud, hybrid, or on-premise?
- How does it integrate with other IT systems?
- What installations are necessary?
Performance
- Can it support multiple simultaneous users?
- Can it handle large data sets?
Administration
- Does it define user roles? If so, are these user roles customizable?
- How does it handle data access permissions?
5. How do I test and select the right process mining solution?
Organizations need to test the process mining tools to understand their features, technically and functionally. Most process mining vendors supply free demos upon request to their prospects or potential customers. For many solutions, a free trial or proof of concept is possible. This involves selecting the right use case and using the software to prove the impact and value while evaluating the viability and practicality of the tool for your team.
6. Pricing elements
When it comes to the licenses, there is no standard pricing between the process mining software vendors, but the basic pricing elements are quite similar.
- A base cost for supplying the process mining tool. This typically includes the upload of files and some base storage. Normally this fee will be calculated for one process that is mined, independent of the number of source systems.
- That means that you should have a look at your End-to-End process (e.g., OTC, P2P). Since the total price tag can grow quickly, it is worth reviewing upfront what end-to-end processes you have.
- Storage: normally based on volumes, like the number of cases. Sometimes also dimensions, data types, and activities are taken into account.
- Data extraction: depending on the type of integration with your IT systems. With specific extractor packages or integration tools, consumption fees might occur. Available extractors might be included for free, but cloud integration components typically come with a price tag based on data consumption.
- User subscription fees based on the definition of user roles: typically, you see cheap viewer roles, business analyst, and administrator roles being defined.
- Some process mining tools allow pre-packaged solutions for instant use. They might come with an extra price if not included in the base tool and will be provided by consultants.
It is worth the time to have a close look at what your needs and data volume are, as well as what the package from the vendor might look like at the beginning of your negotiations. Keep in mind that you might have added consulting costs, especially when you are new to process mining, and do not have the necessary infrastructure.
We hope to have helped with your search for the perfect Process Mining software. Please contact us if you need any help in evaluating your options.