Process Analytics is a specialized branch of business intelligence. It utilizes the same data as most other types of analytics however it views them as the traces of business processes. It connects multiple records belonging to the same business entity (patient, online order, insurance claim, etc.) and brings up a lot of information about the process behind these records.

This information delivers unique and tangible benefits which are not attainable with other types of BI. Let’s start the countdown of top 10 such benefits.

10. You know how your business actually operates. No, not the way it is supposed to operate, not the way somebody says it does, not the way few cases, which grabbed your attention, worked – but how it works in all cases.

9. You discover the special cases. Yes, you know that sometimes an operation could be repeated several times for various reasons. Could you imagine you have the cases where it was repeated 20 times? 100 times? You may be surprised. Such special cases are invisible on the reports with “averaged” metrics however they could be a large contributor to high costs and unhappy and vocal customers.

8. You visualize the flow of your work through the process stages and see the delays, bottlenecks, outliers, and even items moving backward.

7. You measure how much time the parts of your process take. It is especially challenging when the match between the start and end events is not that simple, like multiple payments for the same invoice, multiple invoices for the same order, so you need to specify that you want to measure the time between the last invoice and the last payment. No, you can’t do it with SQL.

6. You calculate time related costs. For almost any company the costs include the fixed amounts, per unit amounts and the time related costs. Once you can measure the time, you may calculate the cost and tie the cost to the specific business process or customer. This could completely change your profitability picture.

5. You see what happens in workflow queues. If your business operates on multiple queues of documents, tasks, incidents, tickets, you know how long the tasks are sitting in the queues, how many queues it takes to complete a task, which employee places the items in the wrong queue.

4. You know what impact the process deviations have on the process duration and costs. You know, for example, that each time the process skips the step D, it takes 25% longer to complete and costs 15% more.

3. You can search by patterns. Search remains a key functionality of any IT system. Most applications allow you to search by the attribute values. But how about: Find me all cases where A and B happened within 12 hours but there was no C between them?

2. You finally solve the compliance problem. Moreover, you solve it for 100% of your cases, not by doing the spot check. You know for sure that the particular sequence of events and the time intervals has never occurred.

And the winner is:

1. You receive the alert about the important process violation right after it happens, not in the next monthly report. You still have time to fix it, to put the document in the right queue, check the policy behind the claim, verify customer credit.

Alex Elkin is Vice President, Head of Product Management at ABBYY and is responsible for driving ABBYY’s product roadmap and strategy. He previously served as Chief Technology Officer of TimelinePI, joining ABBYY with the acquisition of TimelinePI in August 2019. Alex is a graduate of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT).