Process enhancement in process mining refers to the activity of improving the efficiency, effectiveness, and overall performance of a business process based on insights gained from process mining techniques. It involves identifying areas for improvement, such as bottlenecks, deviations, or non-value adding activities, and implementing changes to optimize the process.

Process enhancement differs from process discovery and conformance checking in several ways:

1. Process discovery: This is the initial step in process mining, where historical event logs from information systems are analyzed to automatically generate a process model. The resulting model graphically represents the actual process flow, including all variants and exceptions. The primary goal of process discovery is to gain visibility and understanding of the actual process execution, as opposed to the ideal or theoretical process model.

2. Conformance checking: In this phase, the discovered process model is compared with a predefined or normative process model. The objective is to identify and measure deviations between the actual and the expected process behavior. Conformance checking helps organizations evaluate compliance with regulations, standards, or best practices and detect potential issues, such as process drift or fraudulent activities.

3. Process enhancement: Building upon the insights gained from process discovery and conformance checking, process enhancement focuses on improving the process performance. This may involve redesigning the process, automating tasks, eliminating non-value adding activities, or implementing new rules and policies. The ultimate goal of process enhancement is to achieve better business outcomes, such as reduced costs, shorter cycle times, improved quality, or increased customer satisfaction.

In summary, process enhancement is the step where organizations apply the knowledge gained from process discovery and conformance checking to improve their processes. While process discovery and conformance checking are primarily about understanding and evaluating the current state of a process, process enhancement is about making it better.