During a recent webinar, Mimica CEO Tuhin Chakraborty, Jan Lont, Director of Customer Support for Global Education at Philips, and Rob de Graaf, Senior Consultant in Innovation Management at Philips, discussed how Mimica helped uncover huge automation possibilities that could save thousands of hours a year. The case study below is based on their discussion. To watch the full video click here.

At Philips, one of the largest medical technology companies in the world, patient safety drives every decision. When a customer buys from Philips, the sale doesn't end at delivery. They need training, onboarding, and support before they can use the technology safely and effectively, and that's where Jan Lont's team comes in. As Director of Customer Support for Global Education, Jan runs a department that sits at a critical junction in Philips' ability to deliver on its promises.

The team is experienced, knowledgeable, and deeply invested in getting things right. But they were navigating a process that wound through multiple disconnected systems, hundreds of steps, and years of accumulated workarounds. Work that could have been handled automatically was being handled manually. And nobody had a clean, complete picture of the full workflow or where opportunities for optimization existed.

That changed when Philips partnered with Mimica.

The challenge: processes that outpaced the documentation

Jan's team handles two core functions: customer support for education (helping customers access e-learning and instructor-led sessions) and service contract management. Together, those functions require navigating a web of systems, some of which don't communicate with each other, spanning processes that can run to 300 or 400 individual steps.

Before Mimica, the team relied on subject matter experts (SMEs) who carry years of process knowledge in their heads, periodic workshops where those experts gather in a room to map workflows on flip charts, and a lot of manual judgment about where to prioritize improvement efforts.

Rob de Graaf, a Senior Consultant in Innovation Management at Philips who partnered with Jan and team for process discovery, said that before Mimica the teams couldn’t agree on where to start or pinpoint exact inefficiencies despite the team’s agreeing they existed.  “There's always a pressure on Jan's team to make sure that they serve the customer best,” he said.

"There's always blind spots we have or a bias," Jan explained. "You bring your SMEs, and you reach a consensus. But you always have to wonder, is it the right priority? Does it actually give us the right result?"

The gap between what employees can verbally describe and what they actually do step-by-step is where inefficiency hides. "There's always a gap somewhere," Jan said. 

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The solution: detailed process maps built from observed reality

Philips' Global Education team decided to use Mimica to capture how their team members actually performed their work across every system they touched. 

Jan approached employee buy-in directly: explain exactly what's recorded, what isn't, and who controls it.

"You communicate clearly this is what it's doing and this is what it's not doing," Jan said. "And that creates more comfort with the users."

Getting people on board on the automation side turned out to be easier than expected too. Rob credited the data. 

"It's not so hard to get people on board,” he said. You explain upfront by saying: “‘Okay, we're going to automate this, and it's not going to cost you your job.’ Because based on the data, they believe what you are saying."

Once the project was underway, Rob was stunned at Mimica’s ability to uncover the entire workflow: "You don't have to tell Mimica anything. It will find the tasks itself."

The data revealed something that surprised the team: a majority of the work was happening in Excel. Despite having enterprise platforms like SAP and Salesforce, employees were using spreadsheets as connective tissue between systems that didn't talk to each other. "We have super expensive platforms, but we manage it all in Excel because somehow on the task level, they are not connected."

Seeing this in data, attributed to specific tasks and quantified in hours, changed the conversation. Instead of debating priorities in a workshop, the team could point to the numbers.

From Mimica Miner, the team moved the highest-priority tasks into Mapper where the full process was rendered; every step, every branching decision, every variation. Jan noted that some processes ran to 330 steps, all captured and mapped. 

The process maps made the data legible to people who'd never seen process intelligence output before. Automation scores, volume indicators, and handle time distributions gave the team a shared language for deciding where to go next and what to prioritize.

The results: 3,700 hours of savings

Mimica helped identify five high-priority automation opportunities. Those five projects represent 3,700 hours of automation potential per year. 

The five initial projects spanned the full range of Jan's team's work:

• Automating and consolidating report creation
• Automating document scanning and information retrieval
• Handling new membership setup
• Updating project deliverables
• Automating registrations and welcome communications

Mimica also identified other opportunities that the team has added to their extended roadmap which represent a total of 5,300 to 5,800 hours saved annually.

The team has already deployed one AI agent, built quickly from the Mapper output, for the document scanning and retrieval workflow. 

The month after it went live, the feedback was immediate. "You see smiling faces," Rob said. And they heard the feedback, "'Oh, I don't have to do this anymore. There's an agent doing it for me, and I only have to check if it's correct. Oh, that's a lot easier.'"

The project required less consulting time than planned, largely because of how Mimica structures its engagements. The Mimica value engineer assigned to the project became an integral member of the team rather than an outside advisor.

"It was really a kind of three-way partnership," Rob said. "The operations team, the consultants, and Mimica. The three of us were interdependent." Decisions came faster. Alignment was easier. And the data gave everyone a common foundation to build on.

Jan echoed that. "It's more like a partnership, instead of saying, 'Hey, here's your license. Enjoy. Here's the tool.' You really walked us through it."

What comes next

The Global Education results are already drawing attention inside Philips. Rob is working to bring the same approach to other business units, using the Philips project as a proof point. "They always need the proof point," he said. "And if you provide it, that's a great proof point."

For Jan, the impact goes beyond the five automation projects. The detailed process maps are now an asset for knowledge management: a documented, step-by-step record of how the team's most complex processes actually work. And the roadmap built from Mimica's data gives the team a clear, defensible plan for what comes next, not just for this year, but for a two-to-three year horizon.

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