Business Process as a Service (BPaaS)
Why will process mining change the game for business process as a service (BPaaS)
According to a recent Gartner press release, the worldwide public cloud end-user funding will surpass $675 billion in 2024 with a growth rate of over 20 per cent. Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) is a part of this growth story, with an expected rise in its growth percentage from 9.8 in 2024 to 13.2 in 2025, touching $82.2 billion. As the BPaaS industry is poised for this growth, a disruptive force is redefining its landscape - process mining.
BPaaS is about pursuing operational excellence to stay ahead of the competition, sustain customer loyalty and reduce costs. Today, it translates to elevating the game with unprecedented clarity into the intricate business processes previously thought unattainable. That includes uncovering bottlenecks, inefficiencies and improvement opportunities with surgical precision.
So, what is process mining that seems to have the potential to become the secret sauce of success for BPaaS? From streamlining workflows to enhancing compliance, process mining promises a paradigm shift in how BPaaS providers deliver value and drive competitive advantage.
What is process mining?
All businesses work with information systems. These systems continuously generate logs containing trails of user activities, called digital footprints. These logs tell a story about the organic evolution of the business processes over time. However, businesses often overlook some parts of this story during process optimisation. These logs, if analysed comprehensively, provide deep insights into the various aspects of every process, like bottlenecks, inefficiencies, wait times, checkpoints and more.
Business process mining is a technique that helps discover, monitor and optimise or enhance processes by extracting objective insights from these event logs to:
- Enhance and automate processes
- Check process conformance
- Construct, repair or extend simulation models
- Make predictions and recommendations
Process mining combines data mining with modelling and visualisation techniques to provide end-to-end transparency of every real business process. Such visibility into the most optimal path for a process enables optimised automation for efficiency and speed. Let’s see how process mining in BPaaS translates to a game-changing concept.
How does process mining benefit BPaaS?
BPaaS is the delivery of a Cloud-based BPO service, which is often automated to enhance operational efficiency and reduce costs. Contrary to earlier BPaaS models, these days BPaaS models have either shared or complete ownership of the outsourced processes. They must redesign the end-to-end digital journeys to deliver maximum efficiency and impact. It means a holistic understanding of the processes to ensure automation meets the expectations of the businesses and their customers.
BPaaS vendors have the advantage of scale as most of them have mines of data. All they need to do is implement process mining techniques to find the actionable insights they need to optimise processes best. Once done, they can deploy the same optimised insights to multiple customers.
Let us look at three core benefits BPaas gains from process mining.
- Improved transparency and visibility into business processes
- Control flow perspective that focuses on the order of activities, to arrive at an extensive representation of all possible paths of the activities using some modelling notations.
- Organisational perspective that focuses on the resources that are part of the activities, such as actors, systems, etc., and their relations. This perspective helps define better organisational structures.
- Case perspective that focuses on properties or the values of the corresponding data elements in it.
- Time perspective that focuses on the timestamps to help understand the timing and frequency of activities.
- Real-time monitoring and analysis for better decision-making
- Enhanced compliance and risk management
Automated Business Process Discovery (ABPD) is a crucial capability of process mining. Unlike manual discoveries riddled with errors and oversights, ABPD has four key perspectives, namely:
Collectively, these perspectives provide complete transparency and visibility into the processes to identify key workflow mechanics, bottlenecks, inefficiencies, etc. These insights also answer a crucial question of why these bottlenecks and inefficiencies occur, allowing precision process mapping and efficient optimising. And that’s what sets BPaaS providers apart.
In a highly competitive landscape, the success of BPaaS providers depends on how they emerge as true partners in their customers’ success. And that would translate to a commitment to providing the most optimised processes at any time. And that is only possible through real-time monitoring and analysis using process mining techniques that keep the process improvements going. Data-driven insights help make better decisions that aid continuous improvement.
The ABPD phase of process mining uncovers process deviations, compliance issues or gaps, potential risks in processes or those inefficiencies that aggravate risks. BPaaS providers can fix these issues while optimising processes. Also, they can set alerts for non-compliance for immediate remedial actions in real-time monitoring.
In conclusion, process mining helps BPaaS providers elevate their game to deliver their core KPI - providing the most optimised processes cost-effectively. It helps that it can add a few fringe benefits at the same time.
How can Infosys BPM help?
Infosys BPM’s business process as a service helps enterprises sense, learn, respond and evolve into a Live Enterprise on a fully managed business outcomes-based model. Our cutting-edge solutions are delivered on an AI-first digital transformation model across domains and industry verticals.
