Process Mining - Getting Started

Last updated 2 days ago

Your business events already tell a story, an invoice moving from creation to payment, a case moving through approval steps. The Process Mining Flowchart turns that raw event log into a clear visual map, so you see the story instead of guessing at it.

ℹ️ Here's how it works: each box is a step in your process (an "Activity"). Each arrow shows how often cases actually move from one step to the next. No modeling background needed, no guesswork. Just your real process, visualized.

💡Use it to find answers like:

Where do most cases go, and where do they stall?
Which step is quietly eating up the most time?
Are cases skipping steps or looping back to redo work?
How does the process differ across vendors, regions, or departments?

This guide walks through setup and every feature, in plain language, so you're up and running fast.

Setting up the visual

Required fields

The visual needs three fields to draw anything. Drag them into the field settings on the right:

Field	What to put here	Example
Case ID	A column that uniquely identifies each case (one process instance from start to finish)	Invoice number, Order ID, Ticket ID
Activity	A column naming the step/event that happened	"Invoice Created", "Approved", "Paid"
Timestamp	A column with the date/time the step happened	Event date/time

Until all three are filled in, the visual shows a message asking for them, this is expected.

Optional fields

Field	What it's for
Case Attribute (Benchmark)	An extra column describing something about the case (e.g. Vendor, Region, Department, Amount). Adding this unlocks the Compare feature and colors/labels throughout the visual. You can add more than one attribute field, if you add several, you'll be able to choose which one to compare or animate by.

Configuring the visual (Format pane)

Select the visual, then open the Format your visual pane in Power BI.

Nodes

Setting	What it does
High-frequency color	The color used for your busiest activity. Less busy activities automatically shade toward light gray.
Font size	Text size for activity labels (also slightly adjusts box size and arrow-label size to match).

Edges

Setting	What it does
Color	Base color for the arrows between activities.
Show transition counts	Turn off to hide the case-count/duration text on each arrow, useful if the diagram feels cluttered.

NetSuite (optional, advanced)

Setting	What it does
Account ID	Only relevant if your Case ID values are NetSuite vendor-bill record IDs. When set, an "Open in NetSuite ↗" link appears in the animation replay tooltip (section 8), linking straight to that record in NetSuite. Leave blank if this doesn't apply to your data.

Note: Font color for activity labels is not currently exposed in the Format pane, the visual automatically switches between light and dark text for readability against each box's background color.

How much data can it handle?

There's no hard row limit, the visual keeps requesting more data from Power BI until it has it all, and shows a "Loading data..." message with a running row count while it does. Very large logs will simply take a little longer to load. If loading feels slow, consider using the Sample control (see Interacting with the Visual) to work with a representative subset while exploring.