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Process Mining6 min readMay 14, 2026

Process Mining 101: How to Find Your Best Automation Opportunities

Process Mining 101: How to Find Your Best Automation Opportunities

Before you automate, you need to understand what you're automating. Process mining gives you the data-driven clarity to prioritize the right processes first.

Most automation programs start with a list of processes someone thinks should be automated. Process mining starts with data. The difference in outcomes is significant.

Process mining extracts event logs from your existing systems — ERP, CRM, billing platforms, ticketing tools — and reconstructs how work actually flows through your organization. Not how it was designed to flow. How it actually flows, with every variation, exception, and workaround included.

What you typically find is surprising. The process you thought ran one way runs seventeen ways. The step you assumed took two minutes takes forty-five. The exception you thought was rare happens in thirty percent of cases. This is not a failure of your team — it is what happens when complex work meets real-world conditions over time.

The value of process mining is not the map itself — it is the prioritization it enables. When you can see which process variants consume the most time, generate the most errors, or create the most downstream work, you can make automation investment decisions based on data rather than opinion.

SimpliSmart uses process mining as the foundation of every Smart Business Analysis engagement. It is how we identify the automation opportunities that will deliver the most value — and how we build the business case that gets them approved.

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