Process discovery
Process discovery is the work of finding out how a business process actually runs — its steps, variants, roles, decisions and exceptions — before documenting, improving or automating it. It can be done with people, through workshops, interviews and observation, or from system data, through process mining and task mining. It works best with both.
What is process discovery?
The result is an as-is view of the process. With people, discovery uncovers reasons, exceptions and work outside systems; with data, it adds objective paths, frequencies and durations. The usual pitfall is the tidy version: people describe how the process should run, which walking through a real case helps to avoid.
In software, “process discovery” sometimes refers narrowly to the algorithm that builds a process model from event logs.
Not to be confused with process design, which defines how a process should run in the future. Discovery describes the as-is process; design produces the to-be.
Why it matters for SMEs
For example: discovering purchasing at a wholesaler combines an interview with the buyer and a few days of observation. The system data shows orders and deliveries; the observation reveals the buyer's personal list of acceptable substitute parts, which no system held.
For SMEs, discovery with people usually comes first, because low volumes and scattered systems limit what data can show.
Process discovery in the MentX approach
MentX captures how your company really works: the knowledge of your key people and the processes they run. We offer both a hands-on service approach — mapping your processes and capturing the knowledge behind them, from meetings, workshops and a guided intake — and our own personality-aware knowledge base, with full source attribution, in your own Knowledge Space. We build on the tools you already use and add best-practice solutions where they fit.
Discovery starts every process in the approach: a discovery workshop with the people involved, and capture while the work happens where it helps.