AI-Driven Process Intelligence At Westpac

Forbes

07-04-2025

Westpac Bank office in Sydney
Getty Images
I am a big believer in process mining. My devotion to the approach is partly based on a strong belief in the value of a process orientation; I don't think organizations can improve their operations effectively without it. And I confess I also like process mining because the concept was invented by academics. I feel strongly that the combination of academic thought leadership and thoughtful adoption of their ideas by businesses is very powerful.
That's a combination of forces that is working well for Apromore, a no-code process and task mining vendor, and Westpac Banking Corporation down under in Australia. Apromore was founded by two professors, both of whom are still actively involved in the company. Marlon Dumas, a professor at the University of Tartu in Estonia, has authored or co-authored a number of highly-cited books and articles on process management and mining. He's the head of product for Apromore. His co-founder Marcello La Rosa is CEO of Apromore and a part-time professor at the University of Melbourne. He's also published a lot on process management and mining, including one of the better-selling books on the topic (co-authored with Dumas and others), Fundamentals of Business Process Management.
But a software vendor can't succeed without customers invested in making change and leveraging their wares . Westpac established an 'Intelligent Process Office' in 2022, and it has rapidly addressed more and more processes over time. It started with just two staff and 21 improvement and automation projects in 2022, and progressed to a small team of full-time employees and over 150 projects in 2025. Abhi Kadian is the bank's Chief Process and Intelligent Automation Officer, and heads what is now called the Process Intelligence and Automation Center of Excellence (PIACoE).
Adopting Process and Task Mining at Westpac
Westpac started with process mining because, like many organizations, its leaders wanted to help make workflows more efficient. 'As a service company our processes aren't highly visible. We see staff behind computers, not tangible processes like manufacturing companies,' said Kadian. The bank already had defined workflows, process performance targets, and various IT tools to support processes, however there were some gaps between the envisioned processes and actual work behaviors. The creation of the PIACoE was intended to provide an enabling resource for process monitoring, improvement and management—including tooling, methodologies, sources of data, and training. Process mining tells whether the process is changing and yielding the desired performance; if it isn't, the group undertakes task mining to find out why.
Task mining isn't as widely used as process mining, but it's very helpful in understanding what's happening with work tasks at a detailed level. Process mining is macro-level, task mining is micro. Like process mining, it draws data from the software people use to do their work tasks
'Westpac's process analysts operate with the assumption that by showing what is truly occurring in the process at the micro task level, we can implement interventions to help achieve better business and customer outcomes,' said Kadian. For example, they found after examining poor task mining numbers that workers in one process were spending a lot of their time taking notes of what was on their computer screens. When they discussed this with the workers involved, they learned that the information in that particular system was disappearing while it was still needed. They made it more persistent, and the productivity improved immediately.
Simulating and Optimizing Processes with Digital Process Twins
Apromore, like some other process mining systems, will identify problem areas and potential areas for improvement in the process being mined. But it goes further in creating a digital twin of the process, allowing process analysts at Westpac and other customers to simulate and optimize the process. The analyst can specify possible interventions—adding more people to perform a task or eliminating a step in the process—and understand what the implications for process performance would be.
The combination of process mining, task mining, and simulation for a specific process enables what Apromore's La Rosa calls a 'round trip'— mapping the process, assessing its performance, understanding problem areas with task mining, identifying options for change with digital twin simulation, and then making and monitoring the change. That approach is the key to getting better process performance from these tools.
Westpac is certainly taking a 'round trip' with its processes. Every year they do more of these engagements across the bank using all of the process tools. They're able to do 150 projects in a year not only because they've added people, but also because the tools and their experience have brought down both the cost and the time of a full assessment and digital twin analysis. The cost of doing a project has come down by 85 percent over four years. Kadian has been overseeing robotic process automation (and now intelligent process automation including machine learning) projects for many years and still believes they are useful, but he feels that process and task mining are much more applicable and offer more value to the business. He argues that, 'Process is everywhere and the interventions that can be applied include eliminating, simplifying and automating processes.'