Lessons and best practices from a process mining early adopter

ABB, the world’s leading manufacturer in robotics, power, heavy electrical equipment and automation technology, has been using process mining since 2013. The results have been impressive: lead times to market have improved, variability has been reduced and the company is now able to make strategic decisions across the global business to mitigate issues in one part of the value chain from impacting on the rest of the organization.

Ahead of Process Mining Live 2020, Heymen Jansen, Group Vice President, Head of Advanced Process Analytics at ABB provided a sneak peek into how the manufacturer has explored the opportunities of process mining technology.

PEX Network:

When did ABB decide process mining was the solution it needed?

Heymen Jansen:

In 2013 we were the one of the first clients of Celonis using process mining technologies which they developed in collaboration with the Eindhoven University of Technology.

A small local pilot in one site was started within ABB. After testing and proof of concept we were able to carry out a local roll out across Germany. Germany is one of our biggest manufacturing countries, has good coverage of different types of businesses, high volume per business, process industries and big project systems. So basically, a good playing ground.

We saw opportunities to use process mining to better manage our processes such as receivables, inventory planning and delivery of supplies. The manufacturing plants were using process mining to measure and analyze how they were deviating from the standard modeled process. They used it for standardization and optimization of local processes.

In 2017 I was asked to start building  a global team of advanced process analytics which meant triple the number of users. The trigger was how to automate reporting KPIs, to go from manual reporting and use process mining to instead capture information directly from the source and create a higher transparency on what happens day-to-day in the factories, sales offices, service centers

PEX Network:

How has process mining identified where ABB needed to change?

Heymen Jansen:

Our biggest business at ABB is Electrification, the unit that produces and sells equipment like charging stations for electrical cars but also all electrical equipment in cities, offices and houses.  They have high production volumes and lots of order lines  - in the millions per year. They need to deliver quickly because construction type of companies don’t want to carry a lot of inventory and might be dependent on all kinds of not easy to predict circumstances in their deliveries to clients. Typically, this results in high volumes of relatively small orders, bought at the last moment just before end customer installations.

Delivery time could be between two and ten days. You need a good process in place, the product itself and as low as possible inventories, but sufficient for fast delivery. When we measured our Requested On Time Delivery (ROTD), so basically what lead times customers are requesting, we found we were at average within the industry. So not good, not bad.

We asked: what would happen if we went up to 10% more? We might be best-in-class. Already acknowledged as the best products, we could then be acknowledged as delivering the best service and that could put us in a position where we could grow significantly just because of this better performance.

PEX Network:

Process mining is popular in Europe, less popular in other parts of the world. Are APAC and North America areas for growth?

Heymen Jansen:

The US is catching up very fast. Celonis has opened already a few offices in the Americas and offices in Asia. Probably at the moment there's always a discussion within businesses about whether they should go for the proven Lean approach or apply new Process Mining techniques. There is the option to use both together of course. Might be actually the best of best choices.

PEX Network:

What can we expect from your presentation at Process Mining Live 2020?

Heymen Jansen:

My story will be about using process analytics and mining tools making the next step in enhancing process mining technology in both analytics and operations.

We have developed a process mining system that connects all countries in which we operate. If we can improve our internal processes we can make efficiency gains and decrease lead times across the whole value chain.

To do that you need almost real-time data. At the moment we are reloading the data once per week. We want to do it in the future every two hours, because then we have the ability to have a complete visibility of our internal supply chain, a digital twin of the organization that shows us a full copy of what's happened over the last two hours.

If something significant happens, such as a customer needs to postpone a project, we can see the impact in the whole value chain, how it affects the suppliers and the suppliers of the suppliers. You directly can trigger a factory in China to cease production, postpone production orders or buying of raw materials. We are going to move from using process mining for analytics to using it to prompt action in the process. People will get emails in the morning based on their roles and responsibility telling them to expect, say a 75 per cent probability that something will arrive late, and give them alternatives to consider.

Ultimately the result will be to achieve global collaboration along the entire value chain.

And that might be the significant value: that people globally start to work as one team…

Heymen Jansen’s session, Using Advanced Process Analytics to Become More Competitive will be live on Thursday 26 March 2020, 10:00AM ET