Task Mining and Process Mining, the perfect match?

difference between Task Mining Process Mining

Before praising the merits of the association between Task Mining and Process Mining, it’s important to review these two technologies whose borderline is often misunderstood.

Process Mining

A process company is a succession of steps necessary to achieve an objective. There is a beginning and an end, which is why we often speak of an end-to-end process.

Let’s take the case of an order made on the internet: from the moment the customer initiates a purchase, a series of steps follow, like the validation and the shipping of the order, the pick-up for the delivery person, delivery to the last customer. Each step is present in the information systems log format.

Process Mining collects these logs and gives you a real time picture of how your processes are running: the transition from one stage to another, reworks, loops and bottlenecks. This technology also allows you to analyze process deviations (what does not happen according to the theory) to help you make the right decisions. Finally, Process Mining allows you to focus on one unit of your process (an order, a pallet, an invoice, etc.) to understand the path on the field. Thanks to machine learning and AI, it’s possible to analyze the history and predict the paths of your units in the future (predictive).

Task Mining

To simplify, Task Mining will no longer analyze the journey, but what happens at each step of a process.

Task Mining technologies will be implemented on your employees’ workplaces to identify and analyze each action: they are able to detect mouse movements, to make screenshots of the actions made, etc. Some solutions even use optical character recognition (OCR) to allow text processing from images located on the workspace and/or natural language processing (NLP). The machine learning technology allows the computer interpretation of voice elements transmitted by humans.

The actions carried out on each workplace are analyzed. In a Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) process for example, operators will need to retrieve a purchase order, and insert it into the information system for processing. He will eventually have to create a tracking number and a billing order. So many manual tasks performed on the different workplaces and using different applications of the company. Here again, Task Mining identifies recurring tasks and low value-added tasks to optimize and facilitate the work of employees.

The alliance between Task Mining and Process Mining

When used properly, these two technologies provide an exhaustive view of the entire process: the dynamic vision, the paths followed (Process Mining) and the actions performed at each step (Task Mining).

This comprehensive view has real benefits as it allows to:

  • have a factual and end-to-end view of what is done in the field in order to base decisions no longer on intuition but on actual operations: the discovery and analysis phases of what is done in the field allow for a better understanding of the performance of the execution in the company
  • measure the efficiency of the flows and the productivity of the operators in the company. This allows a better allocation of the resources but also to identify the possible gaps of these two components
  • objectively identify the various possible areas of optimization and therefore conduct RPA or automation projects with an immediate and measurable ROI