An honest comparison
Ace Work vs. process mining
Short version: process mining and Ace Work agree the real problem is that nobody knows where the work goes. The difference is what each one can see, and what happens after the report.
Credit where it's due
Process mining is a real discipline.
Point Celonis at your ERP and it will show you how orders actually flow, where they stall, where the rework hides. For a big company with heavy transactional systems, that's genuine insight. The category earned its reputation.
Mining sees your systems. Most work doesn't happen in systems.
Mining reads event logs. If the work leaves a timestamp in SAP or NetSuite, it's visible. Now walk a mid-market company and watch where the day actually goes: email threads, Slack messages, spreadsheets, copying between tools, chasing approvals, assembling reports by hand. None of that logs an event. The most expensive work in most companies is invisible to mining by design, because it happens between the systems, not inside them.
Ace Work maps that work. The human workflows, including everything the logs can't see, priced in time and money. One of our clients, a media production company, found $1.8M of waste in a single payroll process. It wasn't hiding in an event log. It was hiding in how people actually did the work.
And then there's the report problem.
Say the mining works and the dashboard is beautiful. Now what? Someone still has to decide what to fix, design the fix, build it, get the team to adopt it, and keep it running. The mining vendor's answer is that this is your transformation office's job. Most mid-market companies don't have a transformation office. They have busy people and a dashboard.
Ace Work doesn't stop at the map. Every fix comes fully specified, and anyone can build it: your team, our forward deployed experts, whoever holds the wrench. The small stuff gets built self-service in minutes, below the price floor any consulting motion can reach. And after launch comes the part no report ever includes: onboarding, change management, ongoing improvement, with every run reporting what it actually saved. The report is where we start, not where we stop.
The comparison people actually mean.
Process mining
Ace Work
What it sees
Process mining
System event logs.
Ace Work
How people actually work, including between the systems.
Who it's built for
Process mining
Enterprise, with a transformation team.
Ace Work
Mid-market, with busy people.
After the report
Process mining
Your job.
Ace Work
Ranked roadmap, builds, adoption, running.
The small workflows
Process mining
Below the radar.
Ace Work
Self-service, built in minutes.
Time to value
Process mining
Months of connectors and consultants.
Ace Work
The map starts filling in from the first conversations.
Proof it worked
Process mining
A dashboard.
Ace Work
Every run reports what it saved, in time and money.
Fair questions.
Probably not. Mining shows you your transactional flows. Ace Work covers the human work around them, then does something about both. Some teams feed mining insights straight into the Ace roadmap as evidence.
Logs are precise about what they capture and blind to everything else. The map is built from how work actually happens, checked with the people doing it, and it keeps improving. Different kind of accuracy, pointed at the work that matters.
If you're an enterprise with a transformation program, maybe not. If you're mid-market and the recommendation came with a services engagement attached, ask what happens after the dashboard, and who's paid to do it.
Then mining might suit you, or honestly, so might Ace Work's map on its own. But in our experience nobody actually wants a diagnosis. They want the time back. The diagnosis is just the part everyone skips.
See what your work actually costs.
Thirty minutes. We'll map where your team's time goes and what fixing it is worth, before you build or buy anything.