How do business processes really work inside organisations? Often not the way they are described in manuals or process charts, as participants discovered during the ‘Introduction to Process Mining’ session in the Digital Business elective. Through examples from healthcare, logistics and industry, students gained insight into how data-driven analysis exposes the hidden dynamics of everyday operations.
“Mieke Jans is an inspiring lecturer who delivered an enthusiastic presentation about the possibilities and potential benefits of process mining,” says vascular surgeon Reinier Smeets. “A very valuable session,” adds Arjan Vriend, Sr. Director Maritime Services at GEA. “What I particularly appreciated is that the lecturer is clearly active in the professional field outside the university. As a result, the concepts were not only explained from an academic perspective but directly placed in a realistic context.”
Mieke Jans is professor at Hasselt University and Maastricht University, specialising in Business Process Management, Process Mining, Information Systems and Auditing. Her research focuses on audit analytics and the use of process mining in financial auditing. She opened the session with the observation that virtually every organisational activity is part of a business process. “A process is not just what an organisation does,” she said. “A process is what your organisation is. When processes improve, the organisation performs better as a whole. Increasingly, companies recognise that well-designed processes can provide a real competitive advantage.
Yet understanding how processes actually work is far from straightforward. Over the past decades, organisations have digitised many of their operations through transactional systems such as ERP platforms, recording large amounts of operational data. In theory, organisations also define how their processes should run in an ideal world. In reality, however, things rarely go exactly as planned. Processes evolve over time, exceptions occur frequently, and employees usually only see their own part of the process. As a result, organisations often lack a clear, organisation-wide view of what is really happening on a day-to-day basis.
This is where process mining comes in. By analysing event logs from information systems, process mining reconstructs how activities actually unfold. It reveals how processes unfold in practice: which steps occur, where delays arise, who is involved and how many variations exist. In many cases, this data-driven reconstruction looks quite different from the process models organisations have designed on paper. One key lesson from the session was that new technology alone does not automatically improve performance. Automating an inefficient process simply results in automated inefficiency. Before organisations introduce new digital tools, they first need to understand how their processes really operate. Process mining helps create that understanding.
The analysis typically starts with event logs: digital records that capture activities performed within a process. Each event is linked to a specific case, such as an order, service request or patient, and records the activity and the moment it occurred. However, obtaining reliable insights also depends on the quality of the data. Activities may sometimes be recorded late, inconsistently or outside formal systems altogether. This means that improving data quality is often an important step in successful process mining initiatives.
During the session, Mieke Jans illustrated these challenges through examples from different sectors. In healthcare, for instance, hospitals may log large amounts of operational data without ever analysing how patient flows actually move through the system. In industrial supply chains, urgent decisions by managers can bypass formal procedures, creating discrepancies between the designed process and the process that is executed in practice. Ultimately, process mining helps organisations in revealing the gap between designed processes and real behaviour, allowing them to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement.
The session was very lively with lots of questions, real-life examples and discussions. Reinier Smeets says: “The main takeaway for me was learning about the different methods for mapping a business process and understanding the strengths and limitations of each approach; such as Petri nets, BPMN and process maps. For some processes in my organisation I can already start analysing the data, while for others we will need to capture the data more consistently in order to perform a proper process analysis.”
“What I found particularly valuable was the way theory and practice were connected throughout the session,” says Arjan Vriend. “The concepts were not only explained theoretically but immediately placed in a real-world context. The demonstration of the process mining tool Disco also made it easy to translate the abstract concept of process mining into concrete insights. Although I don’t work directly with these tools in my daily role, understanding the underlying processes helps me assess what organisations need in terms of data quality, process discipline and transparency to successfully apply process mining.”
This article displays the student insights and experiences of the Digital Management week of the Digital Business elective. The MaastrichtMBA programme has an executive modular part-time format and offers two tracks: On-Campus MBA and Online MBA. The programme has a Triple Crown accreditation and is aimed for professionals with at least 5 years of working experience.
