Integrating process mining and task mining for enhanced process analysis

Organizations are constantly looking for a competitive advantage. Improving operational efficiency is one way to create and maintain that advantage.

And improving operational efficiency starts with identifying automation opportunities. And while identifying those opportunities is a top priority for enterprises, it’s often difficult to know where to begin and which automations will have the greatest impact on the organization.

Process mining and task mining offer a comprehensive way to discover opportunities and quantify impact. These complementary technologies analyze different aspects of an organization’s workflows, which can be anywhere in your enterprise, stretching across processes and applications, and can range from personal productivity tasks to cross-enterprise workflows. Understanding these workflows is the first step in end-to-end discovery, where we connect this understanding to automation opportunities that unlock meaningful business ROI.

With the UiPath 2023.5 release, we’ve taken another step towards end-to-end discovery. Organizations can seamlessly combine UiPath Process Mining and UiPath Task Mining to deliver full visibility into processes, and where automation opportunities lie. This blog post will discuss the latest functionality that enables these products to work together to unlock new opportunities for automation in enterprises.

Integrated product capabilities for a more complete discovery to journey

UiPath Process Mining leverages data in your business systems to analyze, visualize, and improve existing business processes. It enables you to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and deviations from the ideal flow, while extracting valuable insights and calculating performance metrics.

UiPath Task Mining, on the other hand, captures interactions and analyzes individual tasks at the desktop level. By leveraging state-of-the-art machine learning (ML), Task Mining analyzes patterns and sequences to identify repetitive, time-consuming, and manual tasks. As a result, Task Mining enables teams to streamline, automate, or eliminate parts of a workflow.

Both are available via the UiPath Business Automation Platform.

When combined, Process Mining and Task Mining provide a holistic view of an organization’s operations, enabling enterprises to identify automation opportunities at both macro and micro levels. Process Mining offers a top-down approach, identifying inefficiencies in process flows. Task Mining focuses on a bottom-up approach, pinpointing tasks that can be automated within those processes.

Process Mining gives us transparency into complex business processes. But when we get to a point where the process is no longer captured by business systems, we can enrich process analysis with Task Mining. Doing so enables organizations to double-click into how employees are performing individual tasks by launching a Task Mining study.

Identify the right opportunities

UiPath Process Mining offers multiple touchpoints where you can launch a study to improve the process.

Process graph

The process graph is a powerful tool that provides a 360-degree view of all processes as they exist. Business users can analyze inefficiencies and identify steps that have a significant impact on desired metrics.

When you identify a step in the process that presents an improvement opportunity, you can dig deeper by clicking on that step and directly launching the study.

Root cause analysis dashboard

The root cause analysis dashboard within UiPath Process Mining allows users to drill down into significant influencers that cause issues or contribute to a major change in desired outcomes or business metrics.

If you uncover a significant influencer, this creates an opportunity to better understand what’s happening at the desktop level. If that’s the case, you can trigger the Task Mining project directly from the node.

Automation potential dashboard

The automation potential dashboard is useful for uncovering leading automation opportunities based on the ROI measured by cost and time savings. This dashboard enables you to run simulations to uncover the impact of automating a specific event.

From that event tab, we can identify a high potential ROI for a specific event, and then launch a Task Mining study directly on that event.

What’s next: enabling Continuous Discovery for the end-to-end process

Once you trigger the project, you can use Task Mining to capture variations of how the task is performed, allowing your center of excellence (CoE) to merge the variations, resulting in an end-to-end view of the process. Capturing the task-level details allows them to identify the top automation opportunities by measured impact, and then directly export the automation skeleton to UiPath Studio to complete the automation.

The UiPath Business Automation Platform is an AI-powered automation platform that offers seamlessly integrated Continuous Discovery. The platform enables you to quickly uncover process and task improvements that have the highest ROI for improvement and pairs it with tools that allow you to drive automation and process improvement while continuously monitoring process execution and key performance indicators (KPIs) in real time.

In summary, UiPath Process Mining and Task Mining, when combined, provide a powerful framework for medium and large enterprises to identify automation opportunities. By leveraging the strengths of both methodologies, organizations can uncover inefficiencies and bottlenecks in their processes, as well as pinpoint specific tasks that can be automated or improved. Read more about the latest improvements in our recent release.