When Microsoft announced its new Power Automate and RPA features, we were excited to see big players entering the business process management arena. SurfaceInsight has always strived to provide enterprises with advanced tools like SurfaceAI that help them improve their business processes and embrace digital transformation with confidence. So, we took a closer look into what Microsoft’s tools had to offer. While the guided tour provides some great insights into how people work, in our opinion, it still misses meeting the process discovery needs of fast-growing businesses.
Key Capabilities are Missing From Microsoft’s Automation Suite
Microsoft introduced Process Advisor to help organisations discover processes that could be good candidates for automation. RPA enhancements were added to Power Automate, strengthening the automation capabilities. RPA bots automate tasks to eliminate manual execution of mundane and repetitive tasks. Process advisor is designed to find such repetitive tasks for automation.
The no-code approach to automation may seem compelling for a few organizations. After all, the no-code approach allows both technical and non-technical users to automate processes – minimizing the stress on an organization to find skilled resources for their automation projects. But processes in the real world are more complex than we think and therefore need more powerful features to discover, document, analyze, and automate business processes that the Power Automate suite does not meet at this time.
Microsoft leverages “Guided Process Tour” to trace the steps taken to execute a task or process. It shows the steps a user would take to complete a process – similar to a tour guide showing the highlights and lowlights. However, it does not capture hidden variations and expectations. You don’t know what you don’t know. When a process is recorded without an eye for variations, users follow a standard operating procedure which is not necessarily the process they would always follow.
If you desire to reap the full potential of your automation program, then you need a process discovery tool that can uncover insights across complex processes spanning teams, applications, and geographies. You need granular insights to find patterns, variations, and optimization opportunities.
SurfaceAI Uses Advanced Technologies to Uncover Hidden Efficiencies
No matter where you are in your digital transformation journey or how ripe your processes are for an automation program, process discovery is an integral part of continuous optimization. SurfaceAI incorporates computer vision and artificial intelligence to gain deep insights into both visible and invisible processes to provide you with the intelligence you need to design your change program.
SurfaceAI provides you with a hassle-free way to capture ‘AS-IS’ process flows along with variations. Unlike the traditional process discovery approach where consultants interview users, automated discovery is fully non-intrusive. Once the end-to-end processes are captured, SurfaceAI automatically generates a process flow diagram from application screenshots and window names, along with titles and descriptions of each step. As we appreciate Microsoft’s effort to further the cause of process discovery, we strongly feel that buyers will see the difference between a guided process tour and automated process discovery. Talk to our experts today to schedule a custom demo for your unique business requirements.