{"id":34534,"date":"2026-08-17T11:40:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T09:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/askme.it\/insights\/business-process-bottlenecks-are-invisible-without-data\/"},"modified":"2026-03-26T12:23:26","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T11:23:26","slug":"business-process-bottlenecks-are-invisible-without-data","status":"publish","type":"insights","link":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/insights\/business-process-bottlenecks-are-invisible-without-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Business Process Bottlenecks Are Invisible Without Data"},"content":{"rendered":"
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An approval process that takes three days instead of three hours. A purchase request that passes through seven hands before being fulfilled. An onboarding workflow that stalls every time a document is missing. These problems exist in nearly every medium and large organization. The point is that they are often not measured: everyone knows the process is slow, there is a general sense of where time is being lost, but there is no data-backed certainty. Automating a process without first analyzing it means risking accelerating the wrong path.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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The process mining market is growing over 30% annually<\/h2>\n

According to the Magic Quadrant for Process Mining Platforms published by Gartner in April 2025, global spending on process mining software grew by over 30% in 2024, maintaining the pace of the previous year, which had marked a 39.5% increase. Gartner evaluated sixteen vendors in the report, including Celonis, SAP Signavio, IBM, ARIS, Appian, Apromore, Pega, and ABBYY. The growth reflects real demand: companies investing in automation need to understand their processes before they can automate them effectively.<\/p>\n

Gartner identifies five main drivers explaining process mining adoption in organizations. The first is process analysis, optimization, and automation: without understanding the context and interdependencies between processes, scaling automation becomes difficult. The second is digital transformation. The third is AI and GenAI: adopting generative AI requires a solid understanding of underlying processes, and process mining provides that map. The fourth is sustainability. The fifth is operational resilience and autonomous operations.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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Seeing the process as it really is, not as it is assumed to be<\/h2>\n

Process mining analyzes event logs from business systems — such as ERPs, CRMs, or ticketing systems — to automatically reconstruct how processes are actually executed. The result is often surprising: the real process diverges from the process drawn in official maps. There are undocumented variants, redundant steps, bottlenecks that always form at the same points, and deviations that indicate exceptions handled informally by operators.<\/p>\n

Task mining supplements this view with analysis of actions at the individual user level: keystrokes, mouse clicks, data entries. This level of granularity makes it possible to understand not only that a step takes too long, but also what the operator actually does during that step, and whether there is a way to automate or simplify it. The combination of process mining and task mining produces end-to-end visibility that no manual process mapping method can achieve with the same accuracy.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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From data to automatic correction<\/h2>\n

GenAI is changing how process mining results are made accessible and used. According to Gartner, generative AI capabilities in process mining systems improve data preprocessing and the discovery phase, support adaptive process modifications through real-time monitoring and recommendations, and improve the comprehensibility of results for a broader audience. Instead of technical graphs interpretable only by analysts, next-generation platforms produce natural language explanations of detected problems and suggested improvements.<\/p>\n

But the most significant step is what Gartner calls execution support: the ability to translate analyses into actionable steps, which can range from simple source application updates to the preparation of scripts that support automated execution of tasks or processes. This closes the loop between observation and intervention, and brings process mining closer to agentic automation.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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Where approval bottlenecks concentrate<\/h2>\n

Approval workflows are among the most frequent use cases in business process automation. Purchase requests, contract approvals, expense authorizations, document validations: all these processes share the characteristic of requiring a human step that often becomes the point where the flow stalls. The approver is in a meeting, did not receive the notification, does not have the information needed to decide, or simply has a queue of requests longer than the time available.<\/p>\n

AI intervenes in these workflows in two complementary ways. The first is making the process transparent: knowing how many requests are pending, for how long, in whose hands, and what the probability is they will be completed by the deadline. The second is automating decisions in cases where the rules allow it: if a request meets all predefined criteria, an explicit human approval is not necessary. In its December 2025 article on multi-agent systems, Gartner describes this architecture as a division of labor where each step is handled by the most suitable agent, with the human agent intervening only when complexity or risk requires it.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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Integrating process mining and agentic automation<\/h2>\n

The connection between process mining and automation is not straightforward. Analyzing a process and automating it are two distinct operations that require different tools, skills, and timelines. The risk that Gartner explicitly flags in the 2025 Magic Quadrant is that without understanding the context and interdependencies between processes, scaling automation becomes difficult. Automation built on an approximate process map produces fragile systems that work well in standard cases and break as soon as they encounter a variant.<\/p>\n

The organizations that achieve the strongest results from automation are those that treat process mining as a prerequisite, not an afterthought. They first identify where bottlenecks concentrate, measure the volume and frequency of variants, and build automation from a position of real process visibility. It is an approach that takes more time upfront, but produces systems that are more reliable and easier to maintain over time.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Global spending on process mining software grew by over 30% in 2024. Gartner identifies five adoption drivers and evaluates 16 vendors in the 2025 Magic Quadrant. The real problem is not automating processes: it is understanding where they actually break down first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":34536,"menu_order":0,"template":"","insights_category":[569],"insights_tags":[633,641,799,817,869],"class_list":["post-34534","insights","type-insights","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","insights_category-automation-and-ai","insights_tags-automation","insights_tags-business-processes","insights_tags-optimization","insights_tags-process-mining-en","insights_tags-workflow-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights\/34534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/insights"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights\/34534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34535,"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights\/34534\/revisions\/34535"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"insights_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights_category?post=34534"},{"taxonomy":"insights_tags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/askme.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights_tags?post=34534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}