Aren’t we living in the era of Intelligent Automation? Deloitte estimates that 73% of organizations started their journey toward intelligent automation in 2021, up 58% from the figures for 2019. Process mining and task mining are the two leading technologies driving this development. In this blog, let us understand how enterprises can leverage intelligent process automation and benefit enterprises with optimization and enhanced performance.
What is the driving factor for process mining and task mining?
One of the prime factors driving the surge in mining technologies is the importance of digital transformation for understanding and analyzing business operations. The advancement in intelligent process automation technologies combining RPA and AI has conduced the development of process and task mining. The COVID-19 pandemic further hastened the requirement for process transformation, highlighting the demand. Additionally, collaborations between business applications like process analytics and enterprise resource planning (ERP) and increased task-level automation implementation are accelerating market growth.
What is Process Mining?
Process mining examines structured and transactional organizational data to identify the links and hierarchies of existing business processes.
Process mining tools visually represent the organization’s process architecture using transactional and log data from numerous business systems, including CRMs, ERPs, human resource management systems, supply chain management systems, etc. Nonetheless, we can highlight that this technology only addresses transactional systems and cannot shed light on either a) user behavior or b) the essential activities that make up a process.
Process mining will be a significant tool for producing returns on automation investments, according to a survey by Gartner in 2022. In order to identify the actual sources of inefficiencies and eradicate them by carefully automating processes, research shows that CFOs frequently employ process mining and related strategies like process discovery.
Though adoption is steadily increasing, only some organizations are able to scale beyond initial implementations, according to McKinsey. Less than 1 in 5 organizations have successfully automated operations across various business segments. This is a typical outcome when an enterprise deploys intelligent process automation without obtaining granular high-level visibility into the business’ end-to-end processes.
This is where task mining enters the scenario.
What is Task Mining?
Task mining is a technology that enables businesses to collect information about how users or employees carry out the many activities that make up a business process by gathering unstructured data and desktop-level information.
According to a survey, 60% of organizations still need help with as-is process visibility. This is because traditional solutions cannot scale to take advantage of the millions of interactions individuals have with emails, chats, applications, and documents at work.
Again, just gaining transparency into business processes alone is not adequate. It is also essential to understand the various ways business processes are carried out (also known as variations), the best way to carry out those variations, and the typical causes of friction within and between systems. This is feasible with task mining techniques that interpret these data and provide them as valuable insights.
5 Reasons to combine task mining and process mining together
By leveraging the power of these two disruptive technologies, enterprises may achieve the following:
Acquire granular data-based insights
Process mining keeps track of operations and gathers information at the organizational level. However, the analysis of user tasks is done at the desktop level through task mining. Managers can get the whole picture by merging the data obtained through task mining with process mining.
Recognize any inefficiencies
Tools for process mining offer high-level information on potential inefficiencies. Managers can further explore desktop-level data with task-mining tools to investigate these inefficiencies. The task mining tool will display different apps, how they are being used, and the numerous ways that operations can be carried out.
Give each task a special identification
An important aspect of business process mining is attaching a case ID, or a unique identifier, to a specific process instance. There is no such step-by-step identifier in task mining. Managers can identify where an activity or task fits inside the organization’s process architecture by combining process and task mining.
Enhance staff productivity
Managers can obtain visibility into the various business divisions and examine workflows for duplication and inefficiency via process mining. Conversely, task mining reveals inefficiencies within a single process, such as using different programs or excessive steps. Combining the two will help you make wiser decisions and enhance the output of your employees.
Where should you scale your teams down, and where should you scale them up? Which users are operating at their best, and who needs training? Only by combining these technologies can you get the answers to these problems.
Act effectively at the right time.
Managers may get a clear and thorough picture of all the workflows by leveraging both processes and task-mining technologies. Once these workflows are modeled, teams can find areas where intelligent process automation can save time and effort for people.
Take away
Any automation project’s first step is process mining. It is a vital step that gives visibility into processes. However, as we move forward, it becomes fundamental to investigate processes, sub-processes, tasks, and sub-tasks to identify and address the underlying causes of inefficiency. Here, task mining software accomplishes this by acting in addition to process mining techniques. At Saxon, we leverage process and task mining to support you in catching those bottlenecks in your operations and open new avenues to automation. If you want to kickstart your digital transformation journey, optimize your processes, and enhance efficiency, you can check out our Intelligent Process Intelligence services.
