About
Process & Task Mining
True process competitiveness comes with a deep understanding of how things are working and where shifts are possible. Process and Task Mining are both forms of technology used to understand how your organisation works.
Process mining
Uses business data in your operational systems to describe a process by telling you which and when steps have occurred.
Task Mining
Looks at user interaction data on a desktop to describe everything done by users to accomplish those steps.
Optimisation
Both of these tools significantly increase the speed and accuracy of process mapping acitivities allowing for optimisation to take place.
What is Process Mining?
A major blocker for many organisations attempting to deploy Intelligent Automation at scale is the identification of suitable candidate processes and the subsequent creation of an implementation roadmap. This is where Process Mining can add immense value.
Process Mining tools interrogate the event logs of key enterprise systems to highlight the steps undertaken in order to complete a specific process. The best tools combine these digital footprints with powerful analysis techniques to clearly present the as-is process along with its variants, even suggesting opportunities to optimise and automate. The benefits of Process Mining are not limited to highlighting automation opportunities but can also directly increase employee experience and customer satisfaction via improved resource allocation.
What is Task Mining?
While Process Mining is a powerful tool for gaining insight into enterprise level processes, Task Mining operates at a desktop level to discover and analyse the tasks that users perform in between taking part in enterprise level processes. This is achieved via the installation of a local agent on each desktop which records user interactions (keystrokes, mouse clicks, etc) and combines this with context recognition to understand how tasks are executed and the variations that exist across teams. (Data privacy and related issues always are taken into account before doing this.)
This brings into focus opportunities for automation that would be missed if using Process Mining alone. Many of the automation opportunities highlighted by Task Mining are good candidates for citizen developers, being by their nature shorter and less complex than those captured through Process Mining software.
Using these tools to unlock value
As previously mentioned, both Process Mining and Task Mining can independently provide immediate benefits by informing improved resource allocation, however, to maximise the potential value these tools can provide, they should be viewed as individual elements within a larger operational excellence strategy.
Combining Process Mining and Task Mining tools such as Celonis, Minit or UiPath Process Gold with intelligent automation tools like RPA, Chatbots and digital intelligence provides a potent mix of discovery, analysis and execution capabilities.
This is increasingly allowing organisations to move seamlessly from identification of improvement opportunities to delivering real time enhancements and efficiencies.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between these tools and Business Intelligence systems?
There are clear differences between Business Intelligence (BI) systems and Process/Task Mining, although they both serve the same purpose of providing insights into processes and enabling business leaders to make better, fact-based decisions. Perhaps the most significant difference concerns finding the root causes of problems. Although both BI and Process Mining help you measure and monitor targets, Process Mining adds to this by helping you perform process analyses that easily reveal bottlenecks, compliance violations, and process deviations, which are visualised in real-time based on your operations.
How do these tools solve problems?
These tools cannot fix the problem for you. They help you identify the most significant problems at a glance with built-in root cause analysis. When you have discovered how your processes work in reality, you’ll surely find areas that you want to dig deeper into.
With Root Cause analysis, you’ll easily see what’s causing problems such as long lead times or repetitive work. Besides identifying the areas that are causing problems, you can also ranks them according to their contribution to business outcomes.
How can Process Mining help with regulation and compliance?
Process Mining enables us to check the conformity of the “as-is process” compared to the designed static process model (BPM) or regulatory rules. Together with the discovery the process variant view becomes available. This powerful view gives us the details about different activity paths followed by users during performing a certain process.