Strategic Business Automated Process Discovery

Businesses worldwide are embracing automation to make their business processes more efficient and to add to their bottom line. The very first step towards this is identifying the business processes that are most suitable candidates for automation. These are the processes that either provide the best ROI or provide the most time saving thus bumping up the efficiency manyfold.

Discovering and documenting all the steps performed by the users during a live environment to identify the actual business process is one of the major challenges that large enterprises face. If a company does not understand its processes, how can it expect to digitize, transform and improve them?

“The biggest obstacle to complex, large-scale automation is the lack of detailed knowledge on the current state of operations.”

Identifying such processes is called Process Discovery. In other words, business process discovery is a combination of tools and technologies to define, map, analyze and identify the use cases that can be automated. Process discovery can be manual or automated.

Challenges of Manual Process Discovery

The current approach to process mapping is to either use manual methods or to use standard process mining tools. Both these methods have their own challenges. For instance, manual process mining is time-consuming, resource intensive, lengthy, and biased.

On the other hand, Process Mining tools-

• Need trained professionals
• Are expensive
• Need months to deploy
• Require log files and connectors
• Can’t capture SaaS, green screen apps, or VDI apps

As you can see, both of these methods are inefficient and expensive. This is where AI-driven automated process discovery can save the day! 

AI-driven Automated Process Discovery

AI-based automated process discovery uses Computer Vision, AI, and Machine Learning technologies to capture the applications being used, tasks performed, and keystrokes along with human interaction to identify each step and automatically create process flow diagrams. Let’s understand how automated process discovery works. 

Business Process Discovery Steps

Here are the steps involved in the process-

1. Deploy software sensors to the user’s desktop to monitor user interactions
2. Collect data from applications like Excel, Slack, Email clients, and so on
3. Process and analyze data in Cloud using advanced AI technologies, NLP, and computer vision.
4. Provide automation opportunities and process improvement opportunities

Automated process discovery:

• Uses top-down approach 
• An ideal solution for large-scale automation projects 
• A large-scale implementation tool to handle hundreds of processes and users efficiently.
• Provides complete projections in terms of ROI and efficiency gain. For example, using AI-driven process discovery a business owner can easily conclude that his/her business saved X million dollars by automating Y number of processes.

One of the best Process Intelligence software that we suggest is FortressIQ which envisions AI and Machine Learning techniques to achieve an agile way of deriving Empirical data about current state business operations and transforming how organizations navigate transformation initiatives and pursue operational excellence.  Here is how–

• Automatic, enterprise wise continuous data collection
• No logs or integrations required
• No workflow disruptions as the data collection take place in the background
• Unbiased, error-free, AI-driven data collection that saves the cost of rework
• Process visualization and reporting at a granular level in real-time

Benefits of Automated Business Process Discovery

Automated process discovery uses Machine Learning capabilities to record all possible variations in each process and make recommendations for Automation. It also helps businesses design automation workflows, map, plan, and implements automation faster and more efficiently than manual methods. Here are some benefits-

• Complete Process Visibility: AI process discovery provides a complete picture of all the steps across all processes. It helps business stakeholders identify the most efficient paths and automation opportunities.
• Root cause analysis: Automated process discovery can help you identify the root cause of bottlenecks, poor performance, and process deviations.
• Accelerated automation: Automated business process discovery enables faster, easier, and more efficient development and deployment of RPA.
• Better quality and performance: Process Discovery software like Automation Anywhere automatically identify, analyze and determine tasks and processes for automation. This approach minimizes the chances of human error and provides accurate, up-to-date insights into process workflows leading to better quality and performance.
• Cost Saving: Automated discovery allows businesses to avoid unnecessary repetitions and remove inefficiencies. Processes can be improved with lesser resources thus reducing costs drastically.
• Competitive Advantage: According to Gartner more than 80% of businesses are still using manual process discovery. Enterprises moving to Automated Process Discovery tools will definitely get an edge over their competitors along with other perks such as reduced upfront costs and faster, more efficient automation.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is automated process discovery?

Automated process discovery is a comprehensive, unbiased, fast, and accurate AI-based solution to identify how people perform business processes. It provides a blueprint to automate critical business processes.

2. What are examples of automated processes?

Automated processes can be used across multiple departments such as accounts, human resources, customer service, marketing, etc. Some examples of processes that can be automated are transcript requests and processing, employee hiring, onboarding, offboarding, purchase orders, claim processing, employee leave, vacation request, etc.

3. What is the key objective of the process discovery?

The key objective of the process discovery is to improve process visibility, create process flow diagrams and identify suitable candidates for automation.

4. What are the best processes to automate?

The best candidates for automation are the processes that are time-consuming, laborious, repetitive in nature, and logical and rule-based functions. Some examples of such processes are accounting, HR planning and management, marketing tasks, claim management, payroll processing, and so on.

5. What processes can not be automated?

Processes, where human touch and personalization are essential, can not be automated. For example, healthcare, teaching, security, usability testing, etc. are some examples where automation won’t help.

Conclusion

As seen above, businesses face multiple challenges during their automation journey such as data collection challenges, process blindness, too many processes across countless systems, and so on. 

Automated process discovery overcomes many of these challenges to create an efficient business process model. It removes the knowledge gaps that exist across departments and functions. 

You can accelerate your automation success and maximize ROI from automation investments using AI-powered process discovery thus improving process visibility and reducing costs.