In today’s era of dramatic advances in technology and automation, virtually every organization is wrestling and experimenting with an increased number of choices on how to best execute work.
But most of them are missing the benefits that come from deep and systemic change. One of the largest failings, in our estimation, is that organizations lack an accurate and detailed understanding of the process or task to be automated. Focus on a complete depiction of the “current state” — a description of how a business process is being performed today, is required to maximize ROI and reduce the risk of significant collateral damage.
Task mining is a data-driven approach for automation that operates at a desktop level. It deconstructs the work to be automated into key elements and discovers task patches most suited for automation. Data is collected and user interactions such as keystrokes, mouse clicks, etc. are used in conjunction with context recognition to gain a deep understanding of task execution and possible variations.
There are many approaches to analyzing the component activities of jobs, but they can be demonstrated with three fundamental work characteristics: Repetitive vs. Variable Work, Independent vs. Interactive Work and, Manual vs. Cognitive Work. Task mining should be done at the initiation of the Robotics Process Automation (RPA) journey and works primarily as a proof of concept and to get organizational buy-in to automation.
The second trending challenge is the linkage between the process flow and the data flow across different IT systems of the organization.
Process mining solves both these issues. Process mining technologies can help organizations capture information from business systems and applications to obtain an end-to-end perspective on processes and identify inefficient ones. It creates event logs as work is done: an order is received, a product is delivered, a payment is made. The selection of where to apply process mining, however, is important. Organizations will get the best value from applying it to processes that have been digitized (i.e. supported by an IT system) and where there is still some unstructured work (i.e. reviews and approvals) that happen outside the IT
RPA alone may not be the solution - Advancements in digitalization, business intelligence, and leveraging data, in general, have contributed to the meteoric rise of both RPA and process mining in recent years. To stay agile in a highly competitive environment, the powerful combination of integrated task mining, process mining and, RPA strategy is key to rethink processes.
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