If you are considering introducing Process Mining into your organization or if you are just curious about what this technique is about, our next article might help you understand the concept and the implementation of UiPath’s solution by answering the 5 most frequently asked questions related to this topic.

1.    How does Process Mining fit into the UiPath Platform?

Process Mining is part of UiPath’s Process Discovery group. Other than Process Mining, the group consists of the Automation Hub, the Task Mining and the Task Capture tools. By using the discovery tools, you can accelerate your automations and optimize your processes more efficiently.

The Automation Hub acts as a central point for discovery. By using the Automation Hub, you can find the automation opportunities, prioritize them based on your company’s needs, and manage them centrally. Task Mining is used for analyzing the normal, day-to-day work of your employees, to try to find those tasks, which are repeated regularly. The Task Capture tool can help you documenting the workflows within your organization.

2.    What is Process Mining?

Process Mining is a technique to analyze and track processes. The scope of process mining can be anything that provides your company value: it can help you understand processes such as purchase-to-pay, order-to-cash, accounts payable, accounts receivable, or incident management. The raw data source is transformed and completed with additional sources, calculations and business rules, and once the final dataset is ready, it is displayed on a dashboard for the business users. Not only different charts, KPIs, or SLAs can be visualized, but also the processes themselves.

With the help of Process Mining, you gain full visibility on what happens related to your processes: how much time each step takes, who are working with whom, and how many possible routes can be identified within the end-to-end processes.

3.    What are the benefits of Process Mining?

The main benefit of using a Process Mining tool is getting an understanding of your company’s processes. In many cases the ideal, expected process differs from the actual one: there might be some extra steps involved, the progress can be delayed by manual or overcomplicated tasks and sometimes bottlenecks, or automation possibilities are missed.

By using Process Mining tools, you can work with a huge amount of log data generated from your systems, complete them with business context and gain insights about your processes. Once the initial findings and improvement ideas are discovered and acted upon, the continuous improvement phase begins, where the results of each change can be followed up, SLA violations or errors can be monitored, and robots or notifications can be triggered. Using Process Mining can help you avoid unnecessary costs, identify automation possibilities, reduce the throughput time of critical steps and improve customer satisfaction.

4.    What type of data is required for Process Mining?

The main data source required for Process Mining are the logs. The logs can be generated from any system e.g. Salesforce, ServiceNow or custom application. The source data can be connected to the Process Mining tool either by using OBDC data load or from exported datasets. Exported datasets are more common if the data is originated from a homegrown system or application.

The base of all event logs are 3 types of data: ID (e.g. invoice ID or case ID), activity (e.g. invoice status or steps of a given process), and the time of the activity (e.g. the time of the status change of an invoice or timestamp of the activity). The process chart can already be created from only these 3 pieces of information, but to provide more context, it should be completed with any additional related data. The additional information helps you to pinpoint the root cause of trends and behaviors and can introduce the company’s own business rules to the analysis.

5.    How does the implementation process look like for UiPath Process Mining?

For the implementation phase to start with the help of the external development partner, the contract is required to be signed by both parties. In the onboarding phase you, as the customer will get a clear picture of what you can achieve with the tool. With UiPath you will have the option to choose from on-prem or cloud solutions. Based on your company’s needs, the infrastructural requirements can be agreed upon in the onboarding phase as well.

After you are boarded, the preparation starts, where the milestones are set, and the roles and responsibilities are agreed upon. In this phase the required data is extracted and checked, and the original process is mapped.

The project sprint consists of all those tasks which are needed to transform the raw data to an actual dashboard. The required transformations are created, the transformed data are validated, and the results are analyzed. At the end of this phase, you will already see the initial insights about your process.

After the project phase ends, the continuous improvement phase begins. It is important to mention that even after the first insights are collected, a lot more can still be discovered or improved, also the actions already taken should be verified and monitored. In order to avoid missing important events, it is also possible to set up automated alerts, for example in case any SLA violation happens, or if any action should be taken to correct an error.

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Along with a very visual dashboard, UiPath’s Process Mining tool also provides an eye-catching process graph animating  the run down of selected activities. Check out our video on an example invoice handling process.