In a previous blog article, we already saw how Process Mining can make a positive contribution to the financial aspect of four primary areas: working capital, risk and compliance, productivity and reporting. This article focuses on reporting. There are a number of ways in which Process Mining can contribute to the creation and use of (the insights from) financial reports.
You can think of data quality, automation, speed and decision-making. How do you take business processes and activities to a higher level with Process Mining? And what happens if you miss this opportunity? Read more for the answers!
Process Mining is gaining popularity
Process Mining is steadily gaining popularity. According to Gartner, most of the larger Dutch companies already use the method to improve business processes, optimize customer journeys and gain more insight into markets and customer groups. The market for Process Mining is growing by tens of percent every year. We also see that Process Mining is a functionlity that is added in more and more digital platforms. This lowers the treshold for using the technology.
Financial reports and Process Mining
In the modern digital age, organizations generate, process and store growing volumes of data. Traditional reporting methods and tools often fail to do justice to the size and complexity of modern datasets. Old technology and outdated methods of data collection and analysis become obstacles to identifying and leveraging the valuable insights found in the reports. Process Mining contributes to solving this problem in several ways.
Increased efficiency
By analysing the differtend systems, Process Mining tools can automatically generate reports that provide insight into Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). The result? Accurate business reports that you prepare faster and with fewer resources. Because you spend less time on manually collecting data and much more time on analysing business reports, you can focus on converting these insights into improving processes and business results.
Improved data quality
Badly ordered, inaccurate and corrupted data is not a good basis for reliable financial reporting. Process Mining helps organizations to ensure the quality of their data. By automatically collecting and analysing data from various sources, Process Mining uncovers anomalies, bottlenecks and other issues. These are all factors that affect the accuracy of your financial reports. Improved data quality ensures more reliable insights and reports. These, in turn form the basis for better decision-making.
Better decision making
By providing better access to better and more accurate data insights (often in real time), Process Mining helps managers make informed decisions based on hard, objective, measurable and verifiable data. The result? Financial reports with more accurate forecasts that help companies stay ahead of the competition.
Process Mining also enables organizations to identify opportunities for investments in new technology of processes. This stimulates innovation and lays a solid foundation for continious improvement of the organization. Without Process Mining, decisions are often made on intuition and gut feelings. That sometimes turns out well but has a considerably lower success rate than a data-driven approach through Process Mining.
Faster insights through real-time dashboards
Many modern Process Mining platforms and software work with real-time dashboards. This means that data can be consulted without delay and is continuously refreshed. This way you quickly produce insights and reports that can be used for making important strategic decisions.
The real-time dashboards can also be used to monitor the performance of processes across departments and locations. By providing a comprehensive view of performance, the dashboards can help organizations identify best practices and opportunities for improvement. Without Process Mining, there is a good chance that you will be overtaken by events and respond too late to new market developments and changing customer needs.
Identify variations and bottlenecks
Within processes, certain activities, tasks or components may deviate from the defined process standard. Consider, for example, processed that take longer than budgeted or activities that involve more people than necessary and that therefore cost more. With Process Mining you uncover such variations and deviations. By recording these insights in automated reports, you identify these obstacles a lot easier and you can focus on solving these deviations in a sustainable way. Moreover, with Process Mining you can recognize not only the symptoms, but also the root cause of a specific problem, allowing you to implement proposed changes more quicky to improve efficiency. This helps organizations to reports operational and financial information faster.
Improved compliance
Regulatory compliance is important. You guarantee the safety within your organization, while you also comply with all laws and regulations for example on data and privacy protection. Do employees skip certain steps in the process? Or do they use tools and working methods that deviate from the defined process standard? In those case, Process Mining can improve the compliance and verifiability of your financial process and reports.
By automating the collection and analysis of financial data, your organization can ensure compliance with regulations and guidelines. Process Mining also provides an audit trail of all financial reporting processes, making it easier for organizations to demonstrate compliance during internal and external audits. This helps the organization to report reliable financial information faster and prevent high fines, security incidents and reputational damage.
Better and accurate reporting thanks to Process Mining
In short, Process Mining can help organizations improve data timeliness for financial reporting by automating data collection, identifying process bottlenecks, streamlining approval processes, providing real-time insights and improving auditability. By leveraging the power of Process Mining, organizations can streamline their financial reporting processes, reduce the time and resources required for manual tasks and report financial information faster. This can help organizations make more informed decisions and achieve better business results.
Would you like to experience the benefits of Process Mining? And are you looking for a partner who can tell you everything about this method based on knowledge, experience and expertise? Deep Value is happy to help you. Curious about what we can do for your organization? Please contact us on +31 (0)30 209 92 70 or info@deepvalue.nl.
Leave a Reply