Process Configuration Mining: what?

Process Mining vs Process Configuration Mining: what’s the difference?

Process mining has been a valuable approach to surfacing opportunities to streamline. It’s been based on tracking user’s screen activity. But, by taking a different approach – how the systems have been configured – there are even more valuable insights.

What is Process Mining

Process Mining is a valuable approach to understanding user behavior.  It’s like a heatmap of the traffic through your city. It tells you what is moving and what is not moving, but not why.

Process mining is useful for understanding adoption, identifying inefficiencies, and streamlining operations. In Salesforce terms, this is achieved by looking at the field history or the event logs to understand what paths that the users are taking. 

The challenge with this approach is that it is incomplete picture. It doesn’t explain your entire org configuration because it is based on a user’s behavior across a time frame. It also requires planning and setup to decide which fields (and you can only choose a limited amount!) are going to be tracked. The mining then requires enough time to collect the data, based on the volumes of user activity in the area of interest. There are also technical limitations with the field history approach, which are listed at the end of the document.

Typical process mining output

Process Configuration Mining – on demand

This is like a detailed blueprint of your city streets. It tells you every street lamp, speed bump, traffic light, intersection, roundabout, bridge, tunnel, and speed cameras. And you can overlap the traffic patterns.

In Salesforce terms, this is a UPN business process diagram that shows the configuration of the Salesforce Org and all the paths that a user can take. It is based on analyzing chains of automations, like apex classes, triggers, flows, quick and global actions, validation rules, workflows, user permissions, fields – in essence, your entire setup. It is live Org documentation. All metadata used to infer the business process is automatically linked to every process step, providing insight into how it is being used, and providing quick access in Salesforce Setup if you need to make changes to your business processes.

This requires access to the rg configuration metadata and some very sophisticated analysis..While AI is used to infer and summarize business logic, it is only possible because Elements.cloud has the most advanced insights on metadata dependencies.

Process configuration mining can be run on the Org for any object at any point in time. What would take weeks of work is done in a few minutes.  So it can be on-demand and used to understand the existing, As-Is business processes and configuration for any planned change, no matter how small or big.  And we know that it is accurate because it is running against your current Org metadata. 

The benefits of this approach is 

• More rapid health check – a complete view of the org configuration
• Better architecture decisions – understand the implications of a change.
• Highlights security risks – shows what usefs can do based on the 
• Reduce technical debt – uncovers functionality that can be reused
• Identify areas of technical debt and cost – configuration and usable

This is a great concept, but I didn’t think it would be possible. I’ve been proven wrong by the team. This is an amazing capability.

Adrian King, CTO, Elements.cloud

Elements.cloud is the only vendor able to provide this because it has the combination of rich metadata , dependency insights, and user access permission data in the metadata dictionary, which includes Agentforce, Data Cloud, and every Salesforce Cloud. And, it also has the process mapping capability which links back to metadata.

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