Traditional Process Discovery vs SurfaceAI

Since the age of human evolution to the new era of artificial intelligence, human thought process has started to expand drastically to get the right answers and discover the facts behind the five W’s (1) Who (source), (2)  What (message), (3) Way (channel  of messaging), (4) Whom (receiver), and (5) with What effect (feedback).

Let me relate the five W’s with the trade processing communication that happens in capital market domain. For processing a trade – The broker (Source) needs to send the trade information (message) via trading portals (channels)to Investment banker (receiver) and receive the confirmation (feedback).

Understanding this process via traditional process discovery can be seen when we deep dive into below noted 2 commonly followed approaches:

Documentation

With the wide range of quality standards and operational rules, organization needs to document and streamline extracted and collected relevant information. The Discovery exercise then consists of identifying various activities, events, systems along with the goals pursued. Some common sources of documentation for this type of discovery are the standard operating procedures (SOPs), governance or standard conformance documentation, internal policies and handbooks which are sometimes missing in entirety or partially in most organization nowadays.

Knowledge Sharing Sessions

In this approach, the coordinator gathers information from subject matter experts (SME) and end users point of views of the process under study via interviews or collectively during a facilitated workshop. During discovery SMEs describes on how they are involved in the process, why they are doing it, what they are using to support their work, where they are doing the work, and when the work is required. Upon completion of the discovery, the coordinator should correlate all the information and make a document on the process. As we have seen from the traditional approaches followed earlier, process identification were tedious, time consuming and error prone. Solution which could resolve, would require automating the process discovery with least manual intervention.

SurfaceAI – Ease of use

SurfaceInsight offers this by recording the process across the wide spectrum of industries without disturbing the ‘AS-IS’ process with their flagship product SurfaceAI. It does not need any documentation or historical records to understand the business process nor does it need any training sessions or knowledge on current operations before commencing the process discovery. This non-intrusive product can be hosted on any desktop and it runs in the background capturing the keystrokes, mouse-clicks on screens without in anyway interfering with the manual activities being carried out on the machine by the user. It uses proprietary algorithm to capture events and extract metadata to generate BPMN process flows & ‘AS-IS’ process maps.

SurfaceAI establishes the functional structure using “Taxonomy ” or “Process Hierarchy”. This structure will serve as the guiding context in which to ensure completeness of scope immaterial of the scope of business. The product auto-annotates the recording steps and generates output in form of BPMN, Video, Swimlane, SOP document along with process and automation insights.

In contrast to traditional process mapping approaches, SurfaceAI provides all required inputs and analysis to organization to optimize the processes and unlock automation road map to maximize ROI.