It is a process management technique that allows an analysis of business’ processes from a record of the events taking place daily in the operation of organizations. What it aims is to extract knowledge from that records stored by the systems in the organization: “the idea of process mining is to discover, monitor and improve real processes (i.e., not assumed processes) by extracting knowledge from event logs readily available in today’s systems” (Van der Aalst, 2016).
Another important feature of process mining is that it takes into account the real process and the ideal processes made in the process design as well, in order to contrast them y recognize improvement spots: “process mining is a relative young research discipline that sits between machine learning and data mining on the one hand and process modeling and analysis on the other hand” (Van der Aalst, 2016). From this, it has been established that the three stages in process mining are discovery, conformance and enhancement (Van der Aalst, 2016).
Information thus extracted is of great value for the company because it allows the discovery of the spots where are placed the delays in activities and to recognize the people in charge of each activity and their performance in each one. This information is also an important source of data for the accurate understanding about the way in which the organizational culture is expressed in actions and whether the busines strategy has an appropriate behavior or has to be transformed.