The intricate dance between large retailers and their suppliers, particularly in the food manufacturing sector, has reached a critical juncture, many big box retailers wield significant influence, dictating not just the quantity and timing of food shipments but also imposing strict deadlines for delivery to stores. These dynamics place a substantial burden on manufacturers, who must navigate a complex landscape of demands while striving to meet the stringent requirements set forth by these retail giants. And the difference in effectiveness often comes down to the capabilities of the organizati ..read more

Process Mining Tip of the Week #50 Filters are helpful Pullups can be handy, but, Both can be faulty   Pull ups in PQL do not respect the filters that you have put on components, sheets, or analyses. I think of pull ups as for loops, i.e., for each row here do something with these rows there. The filters will only affect the here rows, not the there rows! Something to keep in mind as you create your analyses in Celonis. Hope this tip from ProcessMiningIQ helps you in your process mining journey ..read more

Process Mining Tip of the Week #48 We are often asked to determine the time various activities took. Unfortunately, many times there are not timestamps to represent when an activity started and ended. Represented as a single point in time, activities such as "Approve Invoice" lose a lot of meaning.   Addressing single point in time activities Our approach to building out activity effort times is to first create a list of all activities in the system in an OLAP table. We then use the following PQL to order them by their average location in the process: AVG(INDEX_ORDER_ACTIVITY(ACTIVITY_COL ..read more

In a previous post, my buddy Marty Pavlik outlined the difference between BI tools and Process Mining.  You can read the details here https://www.doculabs.com/post/process-mining-vs-analytics-or-business-intelligence I was recently discussing this topic with a group of insurance claims directors and was looking for the right analogy to use to explain these difference and came up with the difference between the box score and the play-by-play (I will admit to being a die-hard Cubs fan and it is baseball season). The analogy goes something like this – the baseball box score is a great way to ..read more

A Center of Excellence (CoE) can make or break your process mining initiative. I spoke with Leslie Goldstone about her experience building a process mining CoE. She shares insights into why many fail and what makes them successful. Failure is often the result of misaligned objectives, lack of education, and insufficient executive sponsorship. Increase your likelihood of success by aligning with company initiatives, continuously educating stakeholders on process mining, and securing an executive sponsor. You can watch the interview below or read the lightly edited transcript below. Either way ..read more

Process Mining Tip of the Week #46   Identifying the root cause of friction points is the most common request we get in process mining projects. One of the easy tools we've used in the past is to create an abstraction of the process just for the friction point.    Outline the issue: We have too many holds placed on our orders and want to understand why the holds are being placed.   A simple analysis without process mining would be able to get you what order sources spawn the most holds, which regions, etc. However, that analysis won't give you the actions taken on the order ..read more

Process Mining Tip of the Week #45 One of the common problems we find in our process mining practice, especially in order management, is handling a host of different string descriptions. For example, an order could consist of 10 lines, each with its own description.   In Celonis, I often want to show the count of order types for an order. For this I would typically just list out the order type at the line level and count the distinct order header IDs.   But what if I want it on the header level?   Then I'd have to do a pull up. I can easily use PU_STRING_AGG. However, it will li ..read more

Process Mining Tip of the Week #47 "We must beware of needless innovation, especially when guided By logic." ~ Winston Churchill   Back when I was working on my PhD, I published a paper on HTTP versions and tried to decipher whether or not version 2 was actually better than version 1.1. Now I find myself attempting to do the same within Celonis.   Celonis has used a particular dashboard UI, Analyses, since the early days back in 2017. It has been improved and expanded. Recently, they have introduced additional versions, entitled Views. This is a precursor to full Object Centric ..read more

Doculabs has hard-earned knowledge about how Celonis works. As a Celonis partner and through our client work, we understand the ins and outs of Celonis process mining better than most. To share what we know, we've created a series of videos. In this video, I break down how the Common Table works in Celonis. Once it clicks, it makes things a lot easier! We can help your team take advantage of these tips -- and even find new ones! You can watch the video and/or skip over to read the transcript. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3b6VdMzb7Q Hi, my name is James Nman. Today I'm going to give you a s ..read more

Unlock the power of process mining and generative AI with ServiceNow! In our latest webinar, we revealed how to leverage ServiceNow's process mining capabilities to identify and prioritize AI use cases for optimizing ITSM, customer service, and HR processes. Dive in for insights into Doculabs' proven methodology for continuous process improvement. Here's the replay or keep on scrolling to read the very lightly edited transcript. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6l--v3uGHo&lc=Ugw5-4xcpZmZxLo-pMZ4AaABAg Tucker: Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us on this glitchy Thursday aftern ..read more