The Company

Minit was founded in 2017 in Bratislava, Slovakia, and now is headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The firm’s CEO & Founder is Rasto Hlavac. Minit has raised $12.5 million in funding, with the last round in 2019, led by Target Global and Salesforce Ventures. The firm has offices in London, New York, Amsterdam, and Bratislava.

The Technology

First of all, it’s worth defining what process mining is; in simple terms, it is a means to analyze, monitor, and improve business processes. Process mining works by (at a minimum) accessing and analyzing log (event) data: what case, event, timestamp, etc. It’s not new but has come into vogue lately, and significant advances have been made in the space to increase these products’ usability and accuracy.

Minit is a process mining technology that runs both on-premises and in the cloud. The technology has two layers: “Minit Analyst” is designed for power users, data scientists, process analysts, etc. to build and manage the core process mining activities, and “Minit Dashboards” provide a comprehensive set of customizable dashboards/KPI’s mainly for the business user.
The Minit Analyst interface is the starting point to populate the Dashboards; it is where business process analysts and data scientists configure and populate the system with data. In practice, much of this data will be imported from common business applications such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, Oracle, Infor, and Microsoft Dynamics. Minit provides pre-configured connectors; as with any such connectors, a further configuration may be needed if the source applications have been customized. Once connected, the data is pulled into visual workflow steps to denote, for instance, invoice payments or a manufacturing process; when that work is done, the system starts to come to life. This may seem obvious, but aggregating and building out the sourcedata has long been the Achilles heel of process mining products. Minit has simplified this work as much as possible, and though there will be exceptions, it is easy to get Minit up and running quickly.

At a conceptual level, similar to other process mining vendors Minit uses a hierarchical approach to analyzing process data; in other words, you start at the highest level to understand the core steps involved and then step down to more granular levels of understanding. In our analysis, Minit does this segmentation of the hierarchies exceptionally well thanks to their Hierarchical Process Mining capability, making it easy for an end user to understand process at the high level as well as drill further down or even upward to understand the actual “as-is” situation. In short, Minit provides an extensive footprint of information to work with and makes it easy to do that work.

Where Minit stands apart is in its ability to provide pre-configured, out-of-the-box templates and automation, for example:

• A function called “Rework Detector” identifies and eliminates complex and often hidden redundant loops.

• Business Rules Monitoring evaluates process behavior and business rules driving company business and provides notification if those rules are violated at a granular level, including how often the violations occur, how serious they are, etc.

• The unique Process Simulation capability closes the gap between analysis and process improvement execution by providing secure, risk-free, quick, and data-driven tools to evaluate improvement ideas and choose the right one.

• Process Comparison naturally compares a process’s performance versus other real-life simulated versions of the same.

• Root Cause Analysis enabled by machine learning (ML) finds patterns and correlations across data to identify precisely what is causing bottlenecks.

Of particular note is the last point. This feature caught our attention as root cause analysis, if accurate, is a potent tool in any business scenario. For example, assuming you have multiple suppliers or third-party entities, it allows you to identify precisely who are the slowest or most difficult to deal with – and most importantly, why – rather than simply being told that 20% of X are exceptions. Historically, process mining and business analysis uncovered bottlenecks; these would then be flagged for further human investigation. A particular task activity might be broken, an employee might not have understood the urgency of the task, or a specific customer might be regularly filing incorrect claims. Minit offers the potential to use ML to find patterns and correlations across the data to identify the actual cause

of the bottleneck. A Minit user can select different attributes and let the ML split the data sets into smaller groups to look for patterns – displaying the results to the end-user through a tree-like diagram. Once the root cause is identified, the user can follow up and resolve the problem. Most business processes are far more complex than the business realizes; such a tool has a lot of potential to navigate that complexity.
All in all, Minit provides a 360-degree view of business process activities, with the ability to share various perspectives and analyses with the business team. The Dashboards are powerful and user-friendly at the same time, so it is easy to click from an overall process flow down to the work itself and to measure the performance of tasks, and even the value flow. Together, these capabilities make it a good candidate for identifying and monitoring the performance of existing and new process activities in context while uncovering correlations and understanding why things are happening the way they are.