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What is process mining?

The system-log discipline that started process analytics, and what it cannot see.

By NodraTech ResearchLast updated: 2026-10-06
Process mining is a technology that analyzes event logs from business systems, such as ERP and CRM platforms, to reconstruct how processes actually execute: the paths cases take, where they wait, and how reality deviates from the designed process. It requires structured logs from the systems involved.

What process mining does well

  • End-to-end case flows inside structured systems: order to cash, purchase to pay, claim to settlement
  • Cycle-time analysis and bottleneck location across process stages
  • Conformance checking: comparing real flows against the designed process
  • Volume-level statistics from historical logs, without touching desktops

Where process mining is blind

Event logs only contain what systems record. The spreadsheet reconciliation, the email approval, the constant switching between two applications: none of it appears in any log, and that is exactly where manual, repetitive work tends to live.

Process mining projects also carry integration weight: extracting, cleaning and modeling event data from each system typically takes months before the first insight appears.

Process mining and workflow intelligence together

The approaches complement each other. Process mining gives depth inside a structured system; workflow intelligence, as implemented by Nodra, gives breadth across everything on the desktop, deploys in days and needs no integrations. Organizations that already run process mining use workflow audits to see the manual work their logs miss; organizations starting fresh usually get faster value from the desktop view first.

Keep reading

What is workflow intelligence?

A plain-language guide to the discipline of understanding how work actually happens.

What is workflow observability?

Software has observability. Servers have monitoring. Factories have sensors. Operations deserve the same.

What is task mining?

The desktop-level discovery technique, explained without vendor fog.

Put it into practice

How we work

The four phases of a Nodra audit, from the install to the second measurement.

The Automation Opportunity Map

What you receive: where time is lost, what it costs and where to start.

Prefer measured answers to theory?

A Nodra audit applies everything on this page to your own workflows in a few weeks.

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Frequently asked questions

What data does process mining need?

At minimum, event logs with a case identifier, an activity name and a timestamp for each step, extracted from the systems in scope. Preparing this data is usually the largest part of a process mining project.

How long does a process mining implementation take?

Typical enterprise implementations run three to six months or more, driven by data extraction and modeling. Desktop-level approaches like Nodra trade some system depth for start-in-days speed.

Is process mining worth it for smaller companies?

Often not as a first step. The integration cost is fixed while the benefit scales with volume, so mid-sized organizations frequently start with an agent-based workflow audit and add process mining later where a specific system justifies it.