Process Mining and Task Mining: 5 Reasons to Leverage the Combined Power of Two Transformative Technologies
- December 6, 2022
- 7 minute read
We are living in the era of intelligent automation. According to Deloitte, 73% of organizations have embarked on their intelligent automation journey in 2021 – a 58% uptick from 2019 numbers. Two key technologies are powering this trend – process mining and task mining.
What is Process Mining?
Process mining analyzes organizational data — structured and transactional in nature to reveal the hierarchy and relationships of business processes as they currently exist.
Process mining tools use transactional and log data from various enterprise systems like CRMs, ERPs, human resource management systems, supply chain management systems, etc., to create a visual map of the company’s process architecture. However, it should be noted that this technology covers only transactional systems and cannot provide insight into a) user behavior and b) the core tasks that make up a process.
In 2022, Gartner finds process mining a key lever for generating returns on automation investments. According to research, CFOs overwhelmingly turn to process mining – and associated techniques like process discovery to get to the root causes of inefficiencies and eliminate them by automating processes in a targeted manner.
But while adoption is steadily growing, as per McKinsey, few organizations are able to scale beyond initial implementations. In fact, less than 1 in 5 organizations have been able to automate processes across different business units. This is a common scenario when one embarks on automation without granular high-level visibility into how the company’s end-to-end processes work.
That is where task mining comes in.
Learn More: What is Task Mining?
What is Task Mining?
Task mining can be defined as a technology that allows organizations to capture data on how employees or users perform the many tasks that make up a business process by capturing desktop-level information and unstructured data.
A study by Soroco and Everest Group found that as-is process visibility remains a problem for 60% of organizations. This is because traditional tools lack the scale to tap into the millions of interactions users have across emails, chats, apps, and documents at work.
Additionally, it isn’t enough to only get visibility into business processes; one also needs to know the different ways processes are getting executed (variations), the most optimal way to execute the processes, and common sources of friction at work within and across systems. This is possible with task mining tools that make sense of this data and present them as meaningful insights.
Learn More: How Task Mining Helps Accelerate Digital Transformation
5 Reasons to Leverage Task Mining and Process Mining Together
By combining the power of these two transformative technologies, organizations can:
- Obtain granular data-based insights
Process mining observes activity and captures data at the enterprise level. On the other hand, task mining works at the desktop level to analyze the tasks users perform. By combining data captured from process mining and task mining, managers can understand the complete picture.
- Identify inefficiencies
Process mining tools provide high-level information on where inefficiencies may exist. With task mining tools, managers can investigate these inefficiencies further by diving deep into desktop-level information. The task mining tool will show various applications, how they are being used, and the different variations in the way processes are executed.
- Associate tasks with a unique identifier
A key feature of business process mining is that it attaches a unique identifier to a particular process instance, which is typically called a case ID. Task mining has no such identifier for each step. By using process mining and task mining together, managers can understand where an activity or task lies within the company’s process architecture.
- Improve the output of the workforce
With process mining, managers can gain visibility into the different business units and check for redundancies and inefficiencies in workflows. Task mining, on the other hand, reveals inefficiencies within a single process – such as multiple apps or too many steps being used unnecessarily. By combining the two, you can improve the output of your workforce by making better decisions.
Where should you scale up, and where should you scale down your teams? Which users are performing optimally, and who could use training? You can answer these questions only by using these technologies together.
- Take the right action at the right time
With process mining and task mining tools, managers can gain a detailed overview of workflows, and once these are modeled, teams can identify opportunities for automation to save employees’ time and effort.
Learn More: 4 Reasons You Can’t Scale RPA Without Task Mining
Conclusion
Process mining comprises the first step for any automation project and provides visibility into processes. But as we progress, it becomes necessary to examine processes, sub-processes, tasks, and sub-tasks to find and resolve the root cause of inefficiency. This is what task mining software achieves by working as complementary to process mining tools.
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