Let’s see in detail the different steps we’ll have to follow in order to manage our analysis properly, such as an investigation. To manage efficiently the process investigation we’ll have to manage several stages in this order:

1. The Understand stage must be focused on understanding the global business.
2. Then we’ll focus on the identification. Here we’ll gather all the information needed to manage the investigation/exploration.
3. Next comes the Define stage which focuses on the process itself. The goal is to really understand the process as it should be performed. We’ll also finalize the organization and the metrics to put in place to be successful. This stage can also be more technical as the second purpose is to figure out how the process works in the “real world” with the apps, systems and people.
4. Now it’s time to Prepare the investigation by gathering the data and preparing them so that they could be exploitable by the Process Mining solution. This step can be iterative as the Data analysis could lead to new Data transformations and so on. It’s also time to prepare for the future by building the Process Warehouse which enables later the Process Mining solution to scale.

Finally we have the Exploration phase. Here, all the previous stages converge to that one in which we’ll really explore and understand what’s going on in the process when it’s used by the systems, applications and users. Again and if the result does not comply with the business requirements it’s possible to loop back to the Data Preparation stage.