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Westpac Bank office in Sydney
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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
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