What is Process Mining?

Every time a ticket, order, or claim moves through a system, it typically leaves a timestamped trail — created, assigned, approved, escalated, closed — scattered across whichever systems touched it. Process mining tools stitch that trail back into an end-to-end map of the process as it truly happened across thousands or millions of instances, which is often strikingly different from the tidy flowchart in a process-documentation slide deck. This is powerful for finding hidden inefficiency: a "typical" approval step that's documented as taking a day might actually average four days because of a rework loop nobody accounted for, visible only once you mine the real event data rather than trusting the documented process. It also surfaces compliance risk — steps that were supposed to happen in order but didn't, or approvals that were skipped — which is valuable both for operational improvement and for audit evidence. Process mining is descriptive, not prescriptive: it tells you what's happening and where the friction is, but deciding how to fix the process — automate a step, remove a redundant approval, retrain staff — is a separate step that follows from the mined insight.