On December 3, the Digital Transformation Community hosted its sixth session, dedicated to the fast‑growing field of process mining—a technology that reveals how processes truly run in practice. By extracting insights from operational data, process mining helps organizations better understand, monitor, and improve their operations.

This session highlighted how these methods are accelerating smart manufacturing, enabling companies to make better, data-driven decisions and optimize their end-to-end production flow.

Process mining enables companies to:

• Monitor processes in real time, revealing what is actually happening on the production floor.

• Predict future outcomes, such as which production orders are likely to be delayed or at risk of quality issues.

• Automatically build digital twins of industrial processes to simulate, monitor, and continuously optimize operations.

These capabilities are central to achieving first-time-right manufacturing, enhancing quality control, and enabling product and process personalization.

Industry Cases: Practice Meets Innovation

Four companies shared practical experiences and lessons learned from applying process mining in manufacturing environments:

• Vanderlande emphasized the crucial role of data preparation when enabling large-scale process mining initiatives.

• Celonis presented the state-of-the-art in the field: object-centric process mining, which moves beyond classic event logs.

• Prodrive Technologies demonstrated how conformance checking helps ensure that manufacturing processes align with specifications.

• Konekti highlighted data transformation as a key enabler for successful process mining projects.

These industry stories showed how organizations are tackling real-world challenges such as production variability, bottlenecks, process deviations, and complex product routing.

Interactive Dialogue

During an interactive session, participants explored two key questions:

• Which business functions will benefit most from process mining?

• Which process mining functionalities are most promising?

The discussion underscored the broad applicability of process mining: from production and logistics to quality assurance, planning, and supply chain management. It also stressed the growing relevance of process mining as manufacturers transition towards data-driven operations.