Get the real process out of the discovery calls

What people say about it

Someone running Celonis at a mid-sized company said the first run is always eye-opening, because people see how far the real process is from the flowchart they call the process. Getting the event log together is most of the project, though. One consultant put it at 80 percent of the time. Mid-market companies do not have a data lake for this.

The business analysts skip the logs. One of them said he never uses BPMN because nobody reads it. A lane per person or system, a box per task, a diamond per decision. Then you sit with the people who do the work and walk through it, and that is when the side spreadsheet and the email to a friend in another department come out.

Why calls and not logs

In a one-week engagement the calls are the only evidence you get. They also hold what a log never does: the exceptions people mention as asides. What happens when the portal is down. Who gets a call when an order does not fit the form. That is the real process.

What we would build

Transcripts go in. For each workflow the client described, the miner pulls out the steps, the handoffs, the system at each step and every exception anyone mentioned, and draws the swimlane. Each step is marked as said on a call or confirmed by an operator. Each finding is scored against the agency's rubric, with the rubric line and the call segment next to the score. The pod lead approves before anything ships.

The last call of the week is the check: the swimlane goes in front of the people who do the work and they correct it. If it works, the report is drafted on Thursday instead of Sunday night, scoring is the same from pod to pod, and the rubric becomes something the agency keeps improving. Event logs, task mining and automation proposals come later, if at all.