Introduction
In recent years, RPA has gained popularity and is known to increase productivity and profits significantly. A report by Ernst & Young noted that 30% to 50% of beginning stage RPA projects fail due to several unforeseen risks. Here is where process discovery plays a critical role.
Process discovery assists MSPs in recognizing the essential processes which are ready to be automated now or in the future by recording all the activities related to data, staff, and technology to comprehend the need for automation. It is the most vital role in successfully automating any process.
A good example can be a multinational company using bots for financial and accounting processes. Auditors note that material accounts have been under-reported last quarter, as the set of rules fed into the bots incorrectly led to such issues. Process discovery can essentially ensure such mistakes don't take place.
The benefits of process discovery lie in visualizing every detail in-depth instead of using only experts to ensure no potential opportunity is missed for MSPs. Process discovery removes any guesswork, making automation transitions smooth, leading to a higher return on investments and savings by locating the best processes to automate for MSPs. Hence, process discovery and automation go hand in hand. Let's dive deeper into what it is all about.
What is Process Discovery
Process discovery is a set of tools utilized to determine, map, and analyze the workflows in a company. It employs both machine learning and artificial intelligence to record all the possible variations of the processes and offers suggestions for automation. Additionally, process discovery helps in designing the workflows and implementing automation quickly and efficiently.
The technique of process discovery represents the existing business processes and the different variations. It provides the following information:
- How the work gets done manually.
- Documenting all the procedures.
- Using the current technology system to aid all the processes.
One of the most well-known tools in process discovery is process mining; both technologies aid in generating precious information on the performance and improvement of business processes. These two techniques are often thought of as the same thing but have distinct differences.
Process mining analyzes based on event logs, while process discovery has an AI method to understand workflows' human and robotic elements. Furthermore, process mining needs linkage to the back-end systems, unlike process discovery.
Process discovery ensures stakeholders can locate the data needed to derive an action plan from the insights. Such a strategy increases transparency at a process and organizational level and the betterment of performance management. Some of the primary benefits include:
- observing all processes of MSPs to ensure scalability and less manual intervention.
- accurately analyzing processes with transparency.
- identification of inefficient processes that need automation.
- monitoring and measuring improvements made.
- making compliance easy, along with access to a complete audit trail.
How Process Discovery works
As evident above, process discovery is an integral element to ensure automation is successful. On a basic level, such tools let organizations understand the structure and process of daily operations. It is an ordered process, moving from top to bottom with in-depth analytics to measure improvements. In essence, it is an overall blueprint of all the processes within an organization.
Process discovery uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to process and analyze deep issues in efficiency and execution. After viewing the entire flow of a process, one can answer crucial questions to divulge into the efficiency of a system and which function to automate.
Advanced algorithms help process discovery tools, collect and analyze data from existing procedures and focus on deriving automation workflows that can then be moved to a complete automation tool to maximize productivity.
How RPA and Process Discovery Work Together
For companies inexperienced in automation, process discovery acts as the center for their RPA initiatives. By doing so, businesses can only automate the processes that can benefit the company and increase the return on investment. If an organization has previous experience automating by maintaining process discovery practices, they can execute functions they want to automate smoothly.
Process discovery reduces the path towards RPA, making sure efficient strategies and automation opportunities get identified. It analyzes the gaps in productivity and optimizes automated business processes to secure the maximum level of automation and sustainability at the lowest cost possible. Hence, process discovery is vital to the success of RPA implementation.
Furthermore, analyzing through process discovery tools can ensure you divert the workflow from failing once it is fully automated. RPA requires standard and data-centric tasks repeated to be efficient. Hence, it is vital to ensure the success of the deployment. Finding the right processes to automate is a rewarding task. It is pretty expensive to automate the wrong procedures, which provides a lousy output and drains resources.
The relationship between process discovery and RPA is complementing, supportive, and ensures success. Some of the primary benefits consist of:
- Offering accurate visualizations of all the processes of a business concerning the set criteria.
- Outlining and identifies the most suitable processes for RPA to execute to derive higher levels of efficiency.
- Determining the best workflows' path for achieving increased productivity.
- Providing analysis of the extent to which processes to automate within a business.
Use Cases of Process Discovery
A few of the use cases for process discovery are:
Sales Cycle Time: Reducing sales cycle time through uncovering underlying issues and resolving them quickly. Process discovery tools can analyze automated sales cycles to ensure resources are used better and make well-informed decisions on enhancing each process. Hence, increasing the key metric values adding to the overall profits of a company. Such a strategy is vital for B2B companies, whose long cycle time can introduce opportunities for their competitors to gain market share.
Delivery time: Providing high customer satisfaction by reducing late deliveries. Process discovery increases on-time deliveries as the reason for late delivery is outlined, making it easier to solve quickly. When taking the automated process with high service ticket volumes, process delivery tools identify the inefficiencies in the workflow to ensure no wastage of time. Doing so helps such automated processes deliver quicker and implement strategies to avoid wastage of time.
Increasing Transparency: Businesses can view the inefficiencies in process execution and process design to ensure the right processes get automated at low costs. Using process discovery tools, companies can increase the transparency of their entire service desk, leading to optimized customer support inexpensively.
Optimizing Processes: One of the issues faced by most businesses is the unexpected problems in RPA arising from having numerous exceptions. A process might have many variations, but it's not practical to automate every variation present. It is critical to focus only on the shared variables. Hence, the more variations bots need to carry out, the more expensive it is. Here is where process discovery jumps in to visualize how many exceptions are present in a given process and the deep-rooted causes. The tool also can reduce the number of variations and allows us to see where to automate, ensuring optimization of the whole process at hand.
ElectroNeek's Process Discovery Capabilities
ElectroNeek's ecosystem offers a diverse range of tools including, IDE, orchestration, bot deployment, and advanced analytics. Process discovery falls under the productivity analytics category and offers numerous benefits.
By using ElectroNeek's productivity analytics tools, your company can track the number of apps used, the most and least used applications, along which websites are time-consuming when used by employees. In addition, the passive and active time of employees can be identified, such as average start and end timings, making automation easier to implement.
Furthermore, it can map out the routine dynamics of each day regarding the potential productive time spent daily, guiding strategies to execute to derive higher levels of productivity.
Therefore, it leads to greater efficiency in terms of choosing the right processes to automate and analyzing improvements.
The key advantages offered by ElectroNeek include:
- Accuracy and Relevance of Analysis: Getting accurate results and statistics of the team's activities in real-time consistently.
- Cost efficiency: The advanced tools internalize productivity measurement tasks, reducing the expenditure and time of outsourcing.
- Acceleration and simplification of the process: Automated productivity analysis reduces the burden of manual labor and shortens the time required to take care of performance analysis.
Conclusion
The information above proves process discovery is an essential aspect of success in RPA. ElectroNeek's tools are integrated with the best technology available. It handles many manual measurement issues regarding efficiency and the team. Additionally, the platform provides state-of-the-art analytics tools to examine team performance and which process to streamline for better productivity.
More than 100 companies in the banking, insurance, accounting, oil, and gas sectors have already reaped the benefits of ElectroNeek's process discovery abilities. If interested to know more information, please get in touch with us.