Why You Need Process Mining for Digital Transformation in Utilities Business
The Utility businesses face a few challenges especially in the domains of meter to cash & field service processes. The meter to cash processes struggle with issues like complex billing process, smart technology, customer complexity, evolving CIS platform and adherence to regulations. The field services have its own set of issues like efficient technician scheduling, first time fix rate, faster & accurate invoicing, integration of enterprise systems & meeting SLAs including C-Sat.
Utilities try to address these challenges and have invested heavily on quality and process mapping tools along with resources to better understand the ‘As-Is’ processes and continually improve them. The current pandemic of COVID-19 has added to the existing business challenges in the utilities. This situation has forced companies to rethink their financial and regulatory strategies while keeping the customer engagement activities still effective. The key mandate now is to clearly address the accounts that need treatment & actions with effective remote tools & techniques thereby ushering in accelerated digital enablement of all systems and processes. Hence, the Utility companies are in dire need of intelligent remote processing cloud based platforms to gather in-depth real-time knowledge from their existing processes like Meter-to-Cash, Field Services, Debt / Collections, Invoicing & Payments etc.
Remote Process Mining Methodology
Remote Process Mining methodology helps utility companies achieve full transparency and higher efficiency in their workflows. It reads the event logs to learn more about the business processes and prioritizes the automation opportunities. This leads to more efficient deployment of BOTs along with waste elimination while it reduces cost-to-serve, thus improves Meter to Cash, Field operations, AMI, Collections and Finance processes.
Advanced analytical thinking is utilized to extract knowledge from the existing data. It combines techniques that support the analysis of business processes based on event logs. During process mining, specialized data mining algorithms are applied to event log data that identify trends, patterns and details contained in those event logs. Using AI and machine learning technologies to analyze the process data, process mining quickly uncovers the root causes of undesirable actions as well as those that are working well.
Strategic Ways to Utilize Process Mining:
- Faster & better decisions through process transparency
- Optimizing expense structure and controlling costs
- Monitor real performance & compare them with targets
- Identify sources of additional revenue
- Auditing, Compliance, Fraud prevention
Tech Mahindra Process Mining Solution
Tech Mahindra’s Process Mining suite has a cloud-based, comprehensive solution for business transformation powered by process mining technology. The intelligence gathered with this platform is further extended to design & develop digital customer journeys. It simplifies business automation, transformation, and software migration projects – including the move to SAP S/4HANA – by enabling full transparency into complex, large-volume business processes with the SAP Process Mining application. It provides Cloud or hybrid deployment, databased process discovery and visualization of end-to-end process flows, automated conformance checking and next best action recommendations and advanced analytics for pattern recognition and root-cause analysis. Celonis incorporates the state-of-the-art Process Mining algorithms that analyze vast amount of data from Oracle ERP systems. It communicates with the newly gained insights in the process with the organization, extend the benefits of the Oracle EBS or Oracle ERP Cloud system with great process insight and analyses at breathtaking speed. It also optimizes the ERP processes and enables the employees to make decisions based on facts.
Tech Mahindra & Celonis Process Mining tool resulted in the following benefits for some of the clients:
- $10Mn savings from eradication of 10Mn manual activities in O2C
- 10Mn incomplete/delayed M2C meter read documentation identified
- $1Mn potential annual savings with reduced RCA time
- +20-30% impact on process optimization & productivity
- +10-15% improved bottom line
- 300+ industry use cases to drive ‘Industry Roadmap'
Why You Need Process Mining for Digital Transformation
The selection of where to apply process mining technology is important. Organizations get the best value by applying it to processes that are digitized (i.e. supported by an IT system) and where there is still unstructured work & unorganized data managed outside the IT infrastructure. Process Mining enables automation of data collection that enables uncovering of process bottlenecks leading to:
- Efficient Robotic Process Automation implementation
- Process Mining Digital Transformation by understanding the process maps
- Complete Process KPI reporting & dashboards
- IT/ERP development including ERP consolidation, new deployments & version upgrades
- Conduct Audits & drive compliance with agreed rules & regulations
Tech Mahindra’s Process Mining suite is not only used as a tool for cost reduction, lean processes but also be used to automate and create digital customer journeys and redesign processes to create digital customer experiences. It significantly improves customer satisfaction and personalization as it uncovers all the waste. It also highlights the customer hot buttons as the processes become leaner, simpler and reduces customer effort to interact with utilities while it becomes a key stepping stone for depicting digital journeys.
