Process Mining in Salesforce with MuleSoft + Apromore

Process mining is an innovative technology to discover and analyze business processes using event data extracted from CRMs and other systems. It enables managers across the organization to gain insights into how to optimize and automate their processes.

Process mining allows service managers to identify bottlenecks, rework, and deviations in their field service processes, understand friction points that prevent first-touch resolution targets to be met, alongside with deep insights into how to tackle these issues to drive operational efficiency and customer excellence.

Common process mining path:

1. Digital footprint: Every process leaves digital footprints (transactions) in Salesforce Clouds and other systems
2. Event collection: Transactional data is extracted from the tables in Salesforce Clouds and other systems
3. Process analytics: Algorithms are used to extract process maps, performance analytics, and digital twins from this data
4. Business insights: Insights into friction points and compliance issues are gained and used to inform your improvement interventions

Where and why can I use process mining?

Process mining can drive business value in pretty much any industry: banking, finserv, telecommunications, healthcare – you name it. When applied to the front-office customer facing processes, process mining has shown that it can drive millions in cost savings while boosting customer excellence and net promoter score (NPS).

For example, after less than one year into their process mining journey, a large bank in Australia slashed millions in costs by eliminating rework and identifying high-gain automation opportunities in their loan origination process thanks to process mining insights. You’d think these cost savings had an undesired impact on customer experience, but they led to faster turnaround times and lower error rates. This directly translates to customer value and satisfaction.

When applied to backend processes, process mining generates insights and improvement opportunities to reduce bottlenecks, rework, and other sources of waste in these processes. It’s also a powerful tool to prioritize and assess the impact of automation efforts.

A large government agency in Europe helped reduce the turnaround times of their purchase-to-pay processes by nearly 30%, by X-raying their processes using process mining and then going after every source of waste, one after the other.

Process mining for compliance

It’s also a powerful tool to drive compliance. The first thing that teams implementing process mining often find out is that processes they thought were straightforward and linear, contain hundreds of different pathways due to numerous exceptions. It’s bad enough that things are not what you might expect, but it can be potentially catastrophic in highly regulated industries where failure to properly document, audit, and report on processes can lead to huge fines.  

You can realize significant value in processes like: field service requests in utilities, customer onboarding and loan origination in banking, claims handling in insurance, customer service in retail, or patient journeys in health and life sciences. The ability to understand, manage, and optimize these types of processes isn’t only nice to have – it’s imperative for organizations seeking to thrive and differentiate in the current market.

Field service requests example:

• Measure service-level quality: Identify root causes for work orders that don’t meet “First Time Resolution” targets and other SLA
• Assess customer experience: Pinpoint frictions like rework and long waiting times in service requests
• Identify anomalies: Detect work orders that deviate from best practices via workarounds and other anomalies
• Analyze workforce productivity: Identify underutilized resources and optimize work distribution across service teams

Process mining seamlessly fits in the Salesforce hyperautomation landscape, whether it’s in MuleSoft RPA for task automation, Anypoint Composer for no-code integration, Flow Orchestration for no-code process orchestration, or API Management and Integration via MuleSoft Anypoint Platform.

In the context of MuleSoft RPA, process mining allows business analysts to derive accurate estimates of ROI via simulation capabilities for each task automation effort, and to monitor those benefits as they are realized. In many ways, process mining can be thought of as an HR system for bots, helping us with recruiting, training, performance appraisals, retraining, and potential retiring and rehiring of bots when needed. 

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How can I start with process mining in Salesforce?

Salesforce has built a value-adding partnership with leading process mining vendor Apromore. But what does this mean for Salesforce customers, and how does adding this important capability deliver effective value for organizations that use Salesforce Customer 360?

Using Apromore and MuleSoft together as an example, the deep integration through the dedicated Apromore connector for Salesforce in Anypoint Platform enables Salesforce users to identify opportunities to automate their business processes, test their impact via process simulation in Apromore, and feed those ideas and opportunities directly into MuleSoft RPA Manager with cost/benefit analysis.

This planned integration helps offer a streamlined experience to source automation ideas with factual information obtained via process mining insights for a Center for Enablement to analyze and compare side by side with other automation requests. After automating with MuleSoft RPA, Apromore can be used to monitor the improved processes to ensure the expected results are achieved, and fine-tuned if needed. This continuous monitoring and improvement approach is what we call “roundtrip process mining”. 

Roundtrip process mining

Roundtrip process mining means that data from the Salesforce Clouds (e.g. Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, etc.) and other systems is funneled transparently into the Apromore process mining platform.

Apromore then enables business analysts to discover and assess optimization and automation opportunities. Their predictive monitoring capabilities enable managers and business analysts to preempt issues in running instances of these business processes, such as deadline violations or customer complaints. They generate alerts and notifications, which may be used to trigger interventions to prevent these and other negative case outcomes. For example, it can trigger escalations when the number of cases predicted to be late is such that a violation of the customer SLA terms may be broken.

Roundtrip process mining helps you to improve, manage, and monitor any of your business processes running in any of the Salesforce Clouds. For example, work orders managed in Field Service Cloud, claims handled in Financial Services Cloud or orders fulfilled in Revenue Cloud, to name a few.

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Unlock the potential of process mining

Whether seeking to optimize current operations and systems, identify areas for further automation, or migrate additional processes to Salesforce, process mining delivers a real opportunity to accelerate these initiatives and ensure greater value driven by factual data analysis and insights.

What’s more, process mining with Apromore, which is a completely no-code solution, can deliver these benefits in weeks, not months. The fact that the return on investment from process mining is typically in the 10–20x range, and often 50x plus, makes a compelling argument on its own.

Note: The Apromore-MuleSoft RPA Manager integration is scheduled to be released in July 2023.