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Developing a continuous improvement plan with process mining
Continuous improvement is essentially a mindset, and the most successful businesses are scaling their continuous improvement plans throughout the entire organization to improve quality across value chains. If you want your business to run well, you need your processes to run well. And if you want your processes to run well, you need to apply a continuous improvement strategy to them at all times.
Warehouses and factory floors are natural habitats of continuous improvement. And understandably so, because the gradual improvement of supply chain and manufacturing operations through an iterative cycle of small scale, positive change is incredibly impactful. But the continuous improvement philosophy can be applied to processes across your entire organization, from finance and HR, to sales and IT.
Continuous improvement with process mining
Implementing a continuous improvement plan across your business means:
Understanding how your processes currently run.
Defining how you want them to run and working towards that desired state through incremental improvement.
Creating guardrails to ensure processes continue to run the way you want moving forward.
As the only way to truly understand how your processes are running at any given point in time, process mining is an essential ingredient for continual improvement. Process mining extracts data from your business systems to show how your processes run in real time, and can be used alongside a variety of project management and continuous improvement methodologies, from lean process improvement to Six Sigma continuous improvement.
These four steps will help you develop a continuous improvement action plan with process mining.
Step one: Understanding how processes run
People don’t know what they don’t know.
In our 2025 Process Optimization Report, we asked business leaders across the world what percentage of their business-critical processes they would describe as fully optimized. The average response is just 55%, indicating business leaders know there’s plenty of room for process improvement.
But in reality the percentage of fully optimized processes is likely to be far lower. As we’ll explore later, there’s really no such thing as a 100% optimal process. There are almost always bottlenecks and inefficiencies within processes, which teams often fail to spot.
In most organizations there are issues in everyday operations that go undetected until they cause major errors. You have to understand how your business processes really run before you can find opportunities for process improvement. Since it’s virtually impossible for humans to accurately monitor process efficiency in real time, some sort of process discovery technology is needed. Process mining is the obvious choice and, according to one survey, 91% of business leaders say they’ll be using process mining by the end of 2025.
Once process mining is up and running, you can see what’s going wrong in your processes and why. Continuous process improvement is then possible because you have the necessary insights to take corrective action based on how the business actually runs, not how people think it does.
Step two: Modeling your desired ‘to-be’ process
Process modeling is vital to establish your desired state for specific business processes. But modeling a ‘to-be’ process is only really effective when you do it with an accurate understanding of the current process. This is how you ensure the model is realistic and accounts for all contingencies you might otherwise miss.
Process mining provides this accurate ‘as-is’ model to help you create a realistic ‘to-be’ model, rather than relying on more traditional forms of process mapping that are based on people’s perceptions of how processes work.
Most improvement efforts will start with modeling the ‘low hanging fruit’ – the easy wins of the continual improvement process. These tend to stem from an existing workflow where, as highlighted by process mining, there are significant problems that are relatively simple to fix.
Step three: Deploying your ‘to-be’ model
When you have a realistic ‘to-be’ model, you can begin to deploy it across the different teams and systems involved. This may mean setting up automations to streamline processes, or connecting existing automations, workflows, and manual tasks through process orchestration. With an accurate view of how your process runs, relative to how it’s supposed to work, you can implement best practices, at scale, to close the gap between the two. You can even use the insights and data points that process mining captures to enable entirely new task automations – or more intelligent, autonomous process orchestration.
Step four: Continuous monitoring
To enable ongoing improvement, you need to continuously refer back to the comparison of how your process is actually running against your desired state. As process mining mines process performance in real time, you can continually monitor the performance of your process relative to the gold standard you’ve set.
The metrics you use to assess process performance will vary depending on process, department, and industry. But you’re likely to be measuring things like cycle times and error rates to ensure continuous improvement.
The perfect process doesn’t exist
It’s tempting to think that if you continue to optimize a process long enough, you’ll achieve 100% conformance with your desired state. But this is unlikely to be the case for two reasons:
Processes aren’t static. There will be changes in your business – such as new product launches or mergers and acquisitions – that will impact your processes. There will also be external changes, from political and economic developments to technological innovations and evolving industry regulations, to which your business will need to respond.
Processes don’t exist in a vacuum. Every process within your business depends on and has an impact on other processes. Even if the process itself doesn’t change, the processes that it intersects with will.
Processes are living, breathing things, so waiting until one process reaches 100% performance before you move onto the next improvement initiative is impractical. For most businesses, achieving operational excellence means getting process performance to around 80%. After that it’s all about ongoing monitoring and ensuring levels don’t drop below this threshold by maintaining continuous improvement efforts.
With object-centric process mining (OCPM), your business has the potential to see not just how individual processes run end-to-end, but also how they intersect with all your other business processes across functions and departments. You can see how changes in one process will impact the performance and efficiency of the rest. When you can see these interdependencies, you can apply continuous improvement planning not just to individual processes, but to your business as a whole.
Continuous improvement in action
The more processes you have connected through process mining, the greater the value you get from your continuous improvement tools.
Packaging company Smurfit Westrock understands this principle and has expanded its use of OCPM from Finance processes like Procure-to-Pay, to Supply Chain processes like Inventory Management. And, with a Center or Excellence in place, it has plans to connect Order Management as well as Maintenance and Production.
As Brian Dodson, Business Process Improvement Manager and Celonis CoE lead, Smurfit Westrock explains: “The closer you get to the business, and the more people touching Celonis, and bringing in those little pieces of value all across the business, the more your value is going to go up.”
Achieve perpetual understanding and improvement
Your business and your processes are perpetually changing, so your continuous improvement initiatives need to keep up. With process mining, you have an understanding of how your processes actually run – end-to-end and business-wide. This gives you a comparison of your desired state with your ‘as-is’ reality, at all times and at scale. All of which gives you the process understanding and visibility to power a continuous improvement plan not just for supply chain and manufacturing but for your entire organization.
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