Many organizations are realizing that in order to make the most of Intelligent Automation, they must first standardize and improve their processes. This has seen the rapid rise of both process and task mining.
But what are these two technologies? How do they differ? And where can businesses use them to improve how they work – and make the most of intelligent automation? Well, lucky for you, we’re going to cover all of that today.
What Is Process Mining?
Process mining, simply put, is the analysis and monitoring of business processes. As a discipline, it seeks to look objectively at how a process is performing in the wider business context. Compared with traditional process evaluation it focuses on the objective state of the process to give a true reflection of how effective it is. In the past, process evaluation has been done through things like staff interviews which can give skewed and subjective results.
Process Mining Use Cases
One great example of where process mining boosts efficiency is for internal and external auditors. It can provide quick, comprehensive insight into the organization’s present and past processes. This lets auditors progress from subjective sample analysis to objective, full, as-is process analysis – delivering assurance and saving time.
Another good place for process mining is within purchasing teams. Typically, they have very high volumes of purchase requisitions that have to be created, verified, and filed before payments can be released and well ordered. Because of the complexity of the task and the number of steps, there is a lot of room for error. Process mining can help identify where the process can be improved as well as which parts can be automated.
What Is Task Mining?
Task mining focuses on smaller process components, i.e. those tasks of the process that are carried out by staff on their computers. This can include taking customer enquiries from a web portal and putting them into a CRM system or filing completed jobs. In addition to increasing the general transparency of how people work, task mining helps ensure that the potential of automation is understood before development begins – particularly by highlighting potential bottlenecks.
Task Mining Use Cases
The best example of task mining in action is tracking how employees carry out tasks on their desktops. A task mining program runs in the background, monitoring clicks, scrolls, and other user actions that go into completing the task.
Task mining software also uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) while recording user actions to understand the context of the user’s actions. It does this by gathering words, figures, and other text from the recording and screenshots taken while the user is in an application and creates a map of them against the user’s clicks, scrolls, and other inputs.
Combining The Two Techniques
In reality, it isn’t a question of processing mining v task mining – they’re complementary techniques. Using both techniques together, businesses can fully understand end-to-end processes and analyze handoffs, resource usage, and other factors to then optimize what they have – ready for intelligent automation to live up to its potential.
Want to make your processes as good as they can be? Get in touch with PAteam today.
