As organizations across the globe are increasingly investing in RPA and planning an enterprise-scale implementation, they are coming to realize the importance of identifying the best automation candidates. Today, organizations know that they need to standardize and optimize their processes to reap the full benefits of their automation program. In fact, the Markets and Markets report notes that the process analytics market is expected to grow to $1.42 billion by 2023. Furthermore, Forrester notes that 83% of business leaders plan to invest in technology to optimize processes. As such, more and more organizations turn towards process discovery, process mining, and task mining tools to understand their business processes better. But, what is the difference between these tools, and which one should you use? Continue reading to know.
What is process discovery?
Process discovery tools rely on advanced AI technology and machine learning to identify patterns and variations in business processes to make better recommendations for RPA. The tool identifies complex automation candidates, maps process flows, and documents steps to accelerate the development and implementation of automation programs.
The process discovery tool runs on users’ machines in a non-intrusive way to monitor end-to-end processes for a certain period, constantly collecting data across people, processes, and technology. This information is analysed by AI to recommend the most optimal process automation and optimization opportunities. Furthermore, it creates automation workflows that can be seamlessly imported to RPA tools for a seamless automation implementation.
What is process mining?
Process mining is an array of techniques that extracts data logs to analyze process execution workflows. The event logs generated from user systems are automatically extracted and analyzed to find opportunities for process enhancement. Though process mining also analyses events to recreate process models, including variants, the approach is less agile than process discovery. For instance, process mining works only for systems that produce event logs. But, process discovery can leverage computer vision and AI to capture very human-machine interaction that can be easily missed in process mining.
What is task mining?
As the name suggests, task mining uses techniques that focus on smaller parts of a process to identify optimization opportunities and add repetitive tasks to the automation pipeline. Just like process mining, task mining works at a desktop level and analyses tasks to identify variations and automation opportunities. Task mining is a good tool for small organizations and citizen developers working on automating less complex processes. Task mining complements process mining or process discovery to provide more granular insights into a particular task.
Choose the best solution for your organization
Now that you know the difference between process discovery, process mining, and task mining, you are in a better position to choose a tool that is best suited for your organization’s goal. While process discovery and process mining are often used interchangeably, you need to double-check with your vendor to ensure the tool meets your business objectives.
Do you need more help to understand how to use a process discovery tool and learn how it can benefit your organization? Talk to our solution expert today.