Understanding the Significance of Process Mining to Accelerate RPA

Introduction

 

Undoubtedly, with the advancement of technology, automation is expanding at an exponential rate, everything is supported by advanced tools and techniques making life much easier. 

 

Following the speed of cosmic rays, robotic process automation has spread in almost every industry, be it healthcare, finance, education, manufacturing and many more. 

 

Infact, RPA is facilitating the operational process and consequently enhances productivity and efficiency. The fascinating technology serves as a tool mimicking humans' interaction with computer systems. 

 

In its simplest meaning, RPA automates day to day complex business processes and performs end-to-end user activities more conveniently. For example, Bots interact with humans in real-time and automates all human activities and functions while making a much more attractive digital workplace. 

 

With respect to multiple substantial aspects the RPA is considering to optimize its capabilities, process mining has evolved as a boosting factor to accelerate the accountability of RPA.

 

Let’s dive deep and understand the process mining and its significance to accelerate RPA in its entirety. 

 

(Must read: Intelligent Process Automation (IPA))

 

 

What is Process Mining? 

 

An analytical practice to explore, operate, and upgrade any real-time process, process mining is a powerful technique to extract knowledge from events/activities compiled into information systems consistently. 

 

Supporting objective, evident-based inferences conducted from real events, process mining aids in deciphering, inspecting and augmenting existing business processes in the context of compliance and performance related aspects. 

 

Accounting real-time data taken from computer systems, process mining spots step by step task procedure a user follows to do his/her work and gives visual and contextual interpretation of performing a task in real practice. 

 

The below image portraits how a real and imaginary process behave and perform;

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Example of process mining, Source : www. venturebeat.com 

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(Suggested reading: How can Automated Artificial Intelligence (AutoAI) Help?)

 

Need of Process Mining 

 

Limited not only to integration of systems and automating repetitive tasks, RPA also streamlines automation and conformance by its own- without compromising business outcomes. It somehow breaks the connection amidst the conception and the operational efficiencies of businesses,

 

Experts reported that if proper diligence is not performed before RPA implementation, critical projects can be unsuccessful or results can be temporary that are inadequate to deliver long term return on investment. This is where process mining comes into picture.

 

In an effective environment, process mining helps in assimilating complete business processes, identifies inefficiencies and congestion, and allows appropriate assessment to know the performance of employees. 

 

In general, capabilities of process mining come under these sections

 

1. Diagnose & Optimize

 

Process mining tools are specifically designed to upgrade business process opportunities, to study existing processes and their comparison and assessment with respect to industry set of standards that help in standardizing processes optimally. For example, 

 

• The document processes can be further practiced for training purposes, maintenance work and monitoring and outsourcing multiple tasks.

• Recommendations provided in case of mergers and acquisitions where standardization and priorities are more significant in order to obtain a latest entity into jibe.

 

2. Monitor and Control

 

Establishing premium industry standards, the very next would be considering worker’s performance through some set of operations under process mining system. 

 

The objective here is to analyze potential and pitfalls, and accordingly formulate a new set of practices that are subjected to distributing tasks depending on the capabilities of employees.

 

These capabilities ensure the correct set of actions to deploy RPA and thus the automated processes are applicable efficiently throughout the value chain as well as the true benefits of RPA can be utilized at their entirety.

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Process Mining Steps, Source

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(Related reading: How RPA is used in Big Data?)

 

Process Mining is Helpful in RPA, How? 

 

Process Mining + Robotic Process Automation=”An Ultimate Partnership”

 

Complementing each other, an integrated solution is agnostic and aimed to trim down any project timeframe while promoting informed decision making potential. 

 

A thorough survey has reported that together they can augment the employment of automation upto much extended level, below are the major significances that Process Mining can add in escalating automation in any project; 

 

1. In order to discover potential areas of growth, process mining can diminish time consumed over findings, reduce iteration quantities and times to initiate the project and confine the dependency on external resources. 

 

2. Being instructed outwardly, process mining efficiently pushes the best process automation with respect to opportunities, and enables RPA implications at large scale. 

 

3. Process mining favors 100 % transparency, and thereby reduces risk in any project. A flood of data is produced in fraction of seconds, to process such a volume of data, optimizing risks are challenging. Process mining not only minimizes implementation risks but also fixes risks in each phase accordingly. 

 

4. Process mining assists in computing, sustaining and modifying multiple processes digitally over time and thereby revealing substantial automation plausibilities in earlier phases once they arrive. 

 

5. To evaluate the existing processes as standardized or not, process mining lets the companies know which problem needs to be fixed on a priority basis-be it standardization or automation. 

 

If processes are found to be standardized, process mining will assist in which processes should be enabled in automation with RPA, and guide RPA to recognize and match the processes being actually conducted in a company. 

 

6. Process mining allows a business to automate and streamline operations through unearthing best practices and allocate them throughout the entire company. 

 

This approach curtails the misuse and accelerates the dispersion of physical and human resources efficiently while responding swiftly to the constantly evolving internal business environment. 

 

7. With the precise deployment of process mining and tools, an individual can easily capture the root causes of process inefficiencies, for the same, this can either make processes faster, or derive process re-engineering thoroughly with RPA. 

 

Process mining can expose uncertain data patterns, code compliance issues, and catch even slight deviations from the actual process. 

 

8. Process mining gives a complete picture of the current state of processes that can be used by RPA to turn those processes into actionable automation. Process mining provides the best automation level, and allows a user to determine how RPA can be employed in legacy processes and systems. 

 

9. Leveraging business-driven automated actions, process mining offers a bandwidth of capabilities to execute such actions efficiently. And implementing RPA bots boost those actions through providing end-to-end automation. 

 

10. This is interesting to note here process mining practices offers pre-automation values such as upstream and downstream impact of automation and RPA computes post-automation through illustrating accuracy and productivity. 

 

Check the video below to learn the visual representation of process mining in RPA implementation.

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Key Notes 

 

As the ending note, we have understood that adding process mining into RPA candidates can accelerate the work from ground in a more cost-effective and sustainable manner. 

 

Robotic Process Automation has the potential to streamline many areas of business. The basic idea is that your business employs a host of virtual robots to take over some of the most boring and repetitive manual tasks. Data entry, auditing, and scheduling are just a few of processes that may be ripe for automation, depending on the software already used to manage these items. -Process mining for RPA implementation

 

We have seen how process mining addresses the root cause of the problem before automation and started automated monitoring of the performance of multiple processes simultaneously on a regular basis.

 

Advancing improvements and automation, process mining tools can be added into present business applications and uplift the IT infrastructure.