The F&O Twist on Process Mining – Warehouse material movement analysis template

In my previous posts about process mining, I explained the basic concept of Process mining including event log data requirements and how to get started with Power Automate process mining. In this post, I will talk about an integration between Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and process mining. It also contains a video with demo of how to deploy warehouse processes to be analyzed and check for bottlenecks in your operations.

Warehouse material movement analysis

In version 10.0.35, Microsoft added a preview of an integration between Dynamics 365 SCM and Power Automate Process Mining. With this feature, you can deep dive into the processes for material movement. The data to be analyzed is based on completed warehouse work using mobile devices. It gives warehouse managers the option to look into the performance of the warehouse, find bottlenecks, and implement solutions for improving efficiency. Microsoft provided a blog with more details about the purpose, features, and some use cases. Power Automate Process Mining empowers warehouses to boost their efficiency significantly – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog

In this blog, I will provide the steps to be able to deploy the warehouse template from Supply Chain Management to Power Automate Process Mining. Before you can start, there are some prerequisites. As mentioned, the feature was introduced in version 10.0.35. At a minimum, you must run this version, but it should also be linked to a Dataverse/Power Platform environment. If you have a tier-1 cloud-hosted environment for development or demo purposes and didn’t link an environment during the deployment, you can’t use this feature.

Next to these environment requirements, some permissions need to be checked. The Dynamics 365 SCM user who will deploy the process must be a Warehouse manager, Warehouse planner, or have the System administrator role. There are also Power Automate permissions required. The user must have the Environment maker or System administrator role.

The feature is available without enabling it on the Feature management workspace.

Deploy process

To start deploying a process, you must open Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Then navigate to Warehouse management > Setup > Process mining > Warehouse material movement process configuration. On Power Automate Process Mining, there is also a template visible for Warehouse material movement. When you want to create a process, it will redirect you to Microsoft Dynamics 365 SCM to complete the process.

In case your environment is not linked with Dataverse, you will get an error. In that case, use or deploy another environment.

When you have a correct linked environment, you can open the form without an error. You can deploy more than one process separating analysis for legal entities or a type of activity.

Click on the button Deploy new process to start a wizard guiding you through the creation process.

The welcome page provides important information about loading initially 200 cases. After the creation, you can enable automatic refresh of a staging table with cases. Then it will load all cases meeting a period setting which is available on the configure step. Click Next.

In this step, you can provide a process name, choose the company, the number of months to load in a staging table, and the type of activity. In my previous posts, I already talked about the purpose of the Activity attribute. You can choose how to visualize and analyze the process. You can fill the activity attribute with the Warehouse location profile, Warehouse zone, or Warehouse location. What to choose depends on your warehouse layout and reporting requirements.

The number of months is defaulted with the value 3. This would load data for a calendar quarter. In my demo database, the transactions are outdated. To ensure I will have data loaded, I selected 300 months. This is not recommended for a production environment.

Click Next for the last page of the wizard. In the last step, you can only read a message that the deployment will continue on a new browser page in Power Automate. Click on Finish to create the process, load staging data, and deploy the process.

A new page has opened where you likely will be asked to provide your credentials again. In case you get an error when opening the new page, you probably don’t have the correct role in Power Automate. If you have the correct permissions, there might be a bug in case you are still on version 10.0.35. In that case, a wrong environment ID is used in the URL for Power Automate. There is a fix available in a quality update.

After that, the preparation of the report will start. This process can take 3-10 minutes, depending on the number of cases loaded in the staging table. You can wait for the report to appear or visit Power Automate later. The basic report will look like the screenshot below.

The staging table with cases not only contains the minimum data requirements, like the Case ID, Activity, and Timestamp. It also has some attributes for more in-depth analysis using the desktop version of Power Automate Process Mining. There are attributes included e.g. an indication if there was a short pick, if goods were replenished, the quantity to pick, the item number and group, the work type, the worker, and a few more. You can then use these attributes to set business rules or filters. You can also use them to let the application find a root cause for long duration times.

For sure, next to looking at a screen to analyze the performance of your warehouse, it would be recommended to physically visit the warehouse and see with your own eyes what is happening. If e.g. the floor locations are full and blocked by a lot of pallets, then moving them around to get to the correct pallet takes a lot of time. Where you can’t continuously look at all areas of the warehouse and monitor all warehouse workers, process mining can guide you on when and where to visually check for more information that is not known in the case details. The link to a Microsoft blog about the announcement of this feature is having a video, showing some use cases on how to use the process mining capabilities.

Refresh settings

After the wizard is finished, you can set refresh options on the process. You can manually refresh the staging table or enable automation for a daily or weekly refresh. There are two batch processes created automatically for maintaining the staging table:

• Refresh process mining staging tables – Runs by default every 5 minutes to check if processes need to be refreshed. After the refresh, a timestamp will be set in the field Last staging table refresh.
• Cleanup process mining staging tables – Cleans up records from the staging table that are expired based on the number of months setting, Runs once per day.

It will be recommended to review the Alert settings for these batch jobs. By default, all jobs are logged when the batch ran successfully. You may also want to review the start time of the cleanup batch.

Next to refreshing the staging data, there are also refresh options in Power Automate Process Mining. The one or the other are not replacing each other. You will need to use both. You will have a manual option, but also settings for automatic refresh of the report data.

More information about the deployment and refresh settings can be read on Microsoft Learn: Analyze warehouse material movement through process mining (preview) – Supply Chain Management | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn

View and analyze the process

From the process configuration form, you can start the option View process details. This will open Power Automate Process Mining with the report in a new browser window. There is also a report viewer available within Dynamics 365 SCM. Go to Warehouse management > Inquiries and reports > Warehouse performance analysis > Warehouse material movement analysis. The next pages opens where you first need to select one of the deployed processes.

In case your report is not visible in the lookup, ensure you refresh the report in Process Mining as reports will be marked as outdated. Outdated reports are not visible in the lookup.

YouTube demonstration video

A video demonstrating the deployment of a process template is embedded in this post. On my YouTube channel, I added a playlist for The F&O Twist on Process Mining. More videos will be added along with more blog posts on Process Mining.

There is more…

Still after some blogs, there are more topics to discuss about process mining. In my next posts, I will for example write about:

• How to create event logs from Dynamics 365 F&O transactional data
• Power Automate Process Mining desktop features
• Create your own Power BI dashboards for Process Mining

If you want to learn more about Process Mining, you can explore the documentation on Microsoft Learn: Overview of process mining and task mining in Power Automate – Power Automate | Microsoft Learn

I do hope you liked this post and will add value for you in your daily work as a professional. If you have related questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to use the Comment feature below.


That’s all for now. Till next time!