What is Process Intelligence?
- September 7, 2022
- 7 minute read
“Process Intelligence is a fact-based approach to help discover, monitor and optimize as-is processes by analyzing process-related information from event logs generated by enterprise systems (e.g., ERP, CRM) and/or recordings of activities that users perform on their desktops.”
– Task Mining Playbook 2022 launched by Soroco in collaboration with Everest Group
Process intelligence solutions enable enterprises to gain complete visibility into as-is processes using a fact-based, data-driven approach. The solutions help enterprises address a wide range of limitations, for example — a lack of as-is process visibility and documentation, identifying opportunities for automation, optimization, and modernization, and orchestrating workflows across systems and applications. In addition, process intelligence solutions have a wide range of applications in generating fact-based insights from processes and helping transform these insights into action.
Why Processes Intelligence Matters
Today’s organizations tackle an unprecedented degree of change – from responding to ever-evolving customer demands to managing rapidly changing workforce dynamics. But these changes can only be executed if organizations have end-to-end visibility into the business processes. For example – a poor customer experience caused by inefficient workflow can impact customer experience (CX) and may lead to customer churn.
Traditional tools and techniques (or process mining) can only capture process-related information from event logs generated by enterprise systems such as ERP, CRM and supply chain management (SCM) but do not provide a 360-degree view of digital interactions outside of systems of record. Additionally, traditional solutions fail to capture unstructured digital interactions via emails, chats, and documents, thus providing an inaccurate/incomplete view of organizational processes.
Learn More: Soroco Launches First-Ever Task Mining Playbook By Everest Group
Factors Driving a Shift to Process Intelligence
Today, organizations spend billions to digitize business processes. However, these processes run across a fragmented landscape that includes enterprise software and a host of applications, making process visibility a real challenge. Without a 360-degree view of enterprise systems, organizations struggle to execute change programs, thus failing to capitalize on growth opportunities.
This is driving a renewed focus on retooling business processes to get deeper, granular visibility into work to establish baselines, discover and remove existing bottlenecks, increase operational efficiency, and drive transformation programs at scale. Now more than ever, organizations need a company-wide view that offers more insights and data than siloed business-case metrics gleaned from enterprise logs and databases.
Below are three factors that necessitate the need for process intelligence solutions:
- Rise of hybrid work
- Attain true business transformation
- Create a continuous improvement loop
Types of Process Intelligence Tools
According to HFS Research, “Process intelligence” gets at the heart of the unifying outcome enterprises seek.
The Task Mining Playbook 2022, launched by Soroco in collaboration with Everest Group, outlines process intelligence solutions can either include or be grouped into two categories, depending upon the nature of data leveraged and the scope of insights generated:
Process Mining: Process mining solutions collect event logs from enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, SAP) to discover and analyze as-is processes. The data captured includes data, time, and user activity. Additionally, process maps capture the different variants – sequence of steps/tasks involved. Through this data, line of business (LOB) managers can use relevant business insights for process discovery, optimization and standardization across teams, units and geographies. Further, the insights aid in checking for compliance and risks.
Task Mining: Unlike process mining, task mining adopts a user-centric lens. It captures the actions users take on their computers, such as keystrokes, mouse clicks, activity screenshots, and generates UI logs. Based on the data captured through user interactions, the software creates process maps that capture the different variations or steps involved in executing a task. In a nutshell, task mining provides the last mile activities performed on various applications, including productivity applications. According to HFS Research, this subcategory is also referred to as process discovery or desktop process mining.
Learn More: Understand Task Mining and Process Mining
Applications of Process Intelligence
Source: Task Mining Playbook 2022
Process intelligence solutions can be leveraged by a wide range of organizations such as financial services, healthcare, pharma, FMCG, CPG, and more that deal with process-heavy and document-oriented business processes. Process intelligence is key to unlocking all the business-critical information spread across structured and unstructured digital interactions within the business process. These insights include a torrent of data residing in various PDFs, documents, and chats and are key to achieving digital transformation.
Process intelligence solutions have a wide range of applications in:
- Process discovery and documentation: Capture, visualize, and document process information such as cost, duration, or applications used across all variants. For example, through process intelligence, a customer-facing team in a financial services firm can identify variations in its workflows and discover areas for optimization, which can result in cost savings and improved CX.
- Process standardization: With process intelligence, organizations can standardize processes across business units and geographies. With process intelligence, organizations can get near real-time data and understand the variations that lead to inefficiencies. With these insights, managers can implement measures to standardize processes and make them work smarter. Additionally, organizations can discover the as-is process and visualize the to-be scenario, thus optimizing processes based on key business objectives. By enabling these measures, organizations can streamline processes, cut costs, and capitalize on new opportunities.
- Uncover new opportunities for automation: By finding hidden redundancies across tasks and processes, process intelligence solutions identify processes that are good candidates for automation. By prioritizing these processes for automation, organizations can free up their employees and help them improve productivity. Further, process intelligence also helps organizations create a continuous improvement loop by tracking processes on an ongoing real-time basis, monitoring the KPIs, and discovering bottlenecks.
- Accelerate digital transformation: By offering a fact-based approach to identifying inefficiencies at a granular level across disparate systems, process intelligence helps organizations streamline processes, in turn achieving targeted business outcomes such as enhanced ROI or improved CX, resulting in a greater competitive advantage.
Why Process Intelligence Should Become a Core Component for Driving Organizational Agility
Digital reinvention has become a significant imperative for organizations across the board. But when it comes to achieving true digital transformation, many organizations still have a long way to go. Despite investing in disruptive technologies and talent, 70% of digital transformations fall short of their objectives, and with profound consequences, research from BCG finds.
For most enterprises, difficulties in realizing the full value of transformation journeys start with acquiring an accurate and comprehensive mapping of all their business processes. Without a complete understanding of process know-how and process improvements, delivering transformation programs at scale is challenging.
Unlike traditional process mining, which helps identify inefficiencies within core applications, but lacks visibility into variations outside of core apps and last mile activity that happens in communications tools, emails, and documents. Meanwhile, task mining relies on screenshots, and OCR/computer vision simply can’t scale across large teams and miss key information captured in transaction logs.
Process intelligence helps bridge the gap by combining data from structured and unstructured sources.
As HFS Research notes, “the entire point of process intelligence is to leverage available insights derived from myriad sources— logs, applications, keystrokes, and clicks—and use them in concert to understand as-is processes better and recommend appropriate interventions.”
Kickstart Your Transformation Journey with Scout
With Scout, you can build a map of business processes and discover how people, applications, and systems interact, uncover inefficiencies, and process variations to understand how work gets done. With a roadmap of process transformation that connects people initiatives (training, standardization) with technology initiatives (automation, application upgrades), organizations can streamline operations and drive immediate business outcomes.
Learn More: https://soroco.com/form/