The Municipality of Rotterdam wanted more insight into the business processes and systems that drive delivery of services to over 1.5 million citizens that live in the area.
Power Automate Process Mining was selected to visualize processes, monitor KPIs, identify bottlenecks, and design effective process improvements.
The process mining team has used Power Automate Process Mining to analyze over 30 different processes across the municipality, encompassing multiple systems.
As the second largest city in The Netherlands, Rotterdam is a major logistic and economic center and home to Europe's largest seaport. Rotterdam is also a modern, bustling, and diverse city with almost 670,000 people and 170 nationalities. The Municipality of Rotterdam, with over 14,000 employees, serves an even larger region of 1.5 million citizens.
To best serve its citizens, the municipality is constantly monitoring and improving the many services provided, including detailed assessments of the business processes and systems that drive delivery. The Municipality of Rotterdam selected Power Automate Process Mining to better guide these assessments.
By extracting event data from systems of record, Power Automate Process Mining visualizes processes, enabling organizations like the Municipality of Rotterdam to monitor KPIs, identify bottlenecks, and design effective process improvements. The process mining capability in Power Automate not only works with Power Platform and the broader Microsoft ecosystem but across many other business systems.
Before working with the process mining capabilities in Power Automate, the municipality’s process mining team had used several competitive products. The first one they tried did not offer the depth of reporting needed while the second turned out to be overly complex.
Power Automate Process Mining provided just the right balance of analytics and simplicity. “Power Automate Process Mining has been wonderfully easy to use while also delivering just the right depth of analysis across a wide variety of processes and systems,” says Genevìève van Gemert, a process mining lead with the Municipality of Rotterdam.
For the municipality, being able to easily share process mining data and analysis was also critical. Again, Power Platform came out ahead. “With Power Automate Process Mining, other employees can quickly and easily access data using Power BI tools that we already use,” explains Jeroen van der Hagen, another process mining lead for the municipality.
This improved access to data helped foster a hands-on, collaborative approach. As the process mining team correctly anticipated, the better access municipal employees have to process mining data, the more motivated they are to act on this data and improve processes. “Given how easy it is to use Power Automate Process Mining, many employees are quickly learning to analyze processes on their own,” says van der Hagen.
Power Automate Process Mining has been used to analyze over 30 different processes across the municipality, encompassing multiple systems. Focus areas include:
Citizen feedback. Every day, the municipality responds to a wide variety of calls and emails from citizens—everything from noise and trash complaints to concerns about a municipal action or policy. Power Automate Process Mining was used to analyze how efficiently these communications are being routed and managed.
Elections. During the 2024 European elections, the vote counting process was monitored in near real-time on election day, providing the project lead with greater visibility and control over the entire process.
HR. Key workflows were mapped from the municipality’s HR system. These workflows will be analyzed to develop improvements that will support migration to a new HR system later next year.
Urban management. The error reporting process was analyzed for the municipality's parking meters. This allowed the team to see which errors occurred in which meters, and how often.
Certifications and permitting. Initial findings indicated that 20% of applicants weren’t completing the application correctly the first time, which can double the processing time. The process is now being reviewed and adjusted to increase the first-time-right score. Success with this analysis has led to data mining for other certificate administration processes, including mapping of the hospitality permit process.
Grants. Previously, a third-party process mining tool was used to support audits of the subsidy process for citizens. Since moving to Power Automate Process Mining, processing mining that used to take all day can be completed in 10 minutes.
As the process mining team has discovered, one successful project has quickly led to requests for similar analysis from other departments. Additionally, to help refine processes even further, one-off reports have often led to requests for continuous monitoring. The team has even started to conduct Power Automate Process Mining demos for other municipalities.
“We’re excited about all the projects that have come our way since using Power Automate Process Mining. We’re even more excited about the resulting process improvements that are benefitting the municipality and our citizens,” says van Gemert.
“Power Automate Process Mining has been wonderfully easy to use while also delivering just the right depth of analysis across a wide variety of processes and systems.”
Genevìève van Gemert, Process Mining Lead, Municipality of Rotterdam
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