Nowadays, business processes are becoming very complicated and making actual processes deviate from the ideal one. As businesses face significant challenges in uncovering the worst bottlenecks that affect productivity. Thus, many organizations are seeking to rolling-out intelligent automation systems at the enterprise level. Hence, making the need for process mining and task mining a mandatory option.
Before deploying such advanced tools, we suggest you look at the ultimate guide of task mining vs process mining. Here, we will learn what process and task mining are along with unveiling the importance of both tools.
What is Task Mining?
Task mining is a new emerging technology that allows businesses to understand better how they execute tasks by tracking user activities and collecting user interactions. Businesses may use the gathered information to examine how they manage operations, identify the most common errors made while executing jobs, and identify tasks that can be automated. As a result, it will improve the automation process and optimize company operations.
Most task mining solutions nowadays are integrated with process mining technology to better understand processes and uncover methods to optimize the entire process rather than just improving how people complete certain jobs.
Working of Task Mining
Here\’s a step-by-step breakdown of how task mining works:
- Keep track of what the user is doing: Task mining tools capture data such as clicks, scrolling, and other activities, as well as timestamps and screenshots, at this level.
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR) helps recognize the context (OCR): The task mining tool can also be used with OCR technology to comprehend the task\’s context while recording. It extracts words, figures, and other content from the recording and screenshots taken during user activity.
- Natural language processing (NLP): NLPassists task mining technologies in better understanding the context of tasks and grouping comparable Thus, organizations enable the tool to understand the specific action while performing a particular task. For instance, different activities have been identified at this step that is required to manage purchasing tasks.
- User activity groups matched to business tasks: User actions are linked with relevant business tasks after grouping. The job of filling out an order form, for example, is connected with the record of filling out an order form. This matching is necessary to evaluate performance metrics in conjunction with the recording.
- Performance metrics are used to assess performance: Finally, records are assessed using business data such as KPI metrics. Companies may observe how they accomplish things and determine how well they perform them in this manner. Businesses may use this evaluation to enhance their performance metrics by completing the following steps:
- Determine why some jobs are carried out inefficiently.
- Recognize the most significant blunders and teach staff how to prevent them.
- Look for options for automation.
Task mining potential
When we look back over the last five years, task mining has maintained a decent level of attention. Though, its popularity hasn\’t risen much due to the following possible reasons:
- Task mining with the use of computer vision and natural language processing (NLP) is an emerging technology that we will likely hear more about in the future, and it hasn\’t had enough time to become a well-known solution yet.
- The increase in the popularity of process mining. Since many task mining vendors are also providing process mining solutions.
Furthermore, task mining is considered to be safer, complements privacy and security. Thus, the provided advanced privacy features to ensure the selection of relevant users’ data while hiding their sensitive and private data. Also, it approves the individuals to take a look at the user’s interaction data. To enhance optimization, companies like Optimushive are providing high-quality task mining solutions to organizations while keeping privacy and safety as a top priority. Please read more about task mining solutions provided by Optimushive and grow your business.
Cited below is the Google Trends that predict the potential interest of task mining that will rapidly increase soon.
Main benefits of task mining
The major benefits of task mining are similar to those of process mining, even though task mining is a separate type of process mining. Hence, task mining gives a more in-depth look into processes. It allows organizations to track how employees complete activities, improve employee performance and automate jobs when possible.
- Discovering how you handle business tasks and understanding processes: Task mining uses user interaction data, images, and recordings to offer a complete picture of how businesses perform their tasks. Businesses may uncover unrecognized activity performed by employees while executing their jobs, and they may wish to take them into account while process planning.
- Enhancing process efficiency:
- Employee user experience could be improved
- Unnecessary acts have been identified and eliminated.
- Investigate the possibilities for automation.
- Process deviations are reduced
What is Process Mining?
Typically, process mining is a method of analyzing an organization’s processes in order to acquire a comprehensive understanding of them. It is a layer of software that is linked with the company\’s IT systems that represent the real performance of the business operations. Process mining software packages generate visualizations and other outputs that detail any bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or gaps in the organization\’s processes. As a consequence, businesses will be able to concentrate their efforts on future progress.
According to Wikipedia:
“Specialized data mining algorithms are applied to event log data during process mining to detect trends, patterns, and details contained in an information system\’s event logs.”
How does process mining work?
Process mining tool extracts actual process models from raw event logs. These tools demonstrate to companies how their processes work in real life by collecting event logs from each case and merging them.
The following is a step-by-step explanation of how process mining tools work:
- The process mining tools work together with other software to collect event logs from the organization\’s system
- These tools use the event logs to extract the activity sequence for each occurrence. Variations between cases will become evident in this stage, and these discrepancies emerge as a result of manual alterations or procedural mistakes.
- After the derivation of each case\’s activity sequence, process mining techniques begin to \”merge\” these sequences. The actual procedure will become more sophisticated than the intended one when changes arise. This output also allows the business to see where its process has strayed.
Why is it termed “process mining?”
The term is derived from the discipline of data mining, as the technique works in a similar manner. For a given goal, data mining examines data and employs various algorithms or approaches.
Data Mining vs. Data Science Trends:
As you can observe from the below graph, provided by Google trends, data science is becoming more popular as a term though.
Process mining, like data mining, \”mines\” event logs and process-related data and helps organizations understand processes better. The following items are included to understand the complete processes:
- Recognizing trends, patterns, and deviations in the process
- In-depth visualizing actual processes
- Identifying automation opportunities
- Identifying novel strategies to enhance the efficiency of the process
Main Capabilities of Process Mining:
By utilizing data, process mining assists organizations in better understanding their operations. This technology allows for the discovery of real processes and their variations and the monitoring of performance levels and strategies to enhance them.
Discovering Processes
- Identifying current processes
- Identifying process irregularities
- Identifying the opportunities for automation
Analysis of Non-Conformant Instances
- Analyzing the percentage of non-conformant cases
- Determining the main causes
Validation of the Process
Process mining uses real-time data to present users with insights. This allows businesses to verify their process results and corroborate their existing situations. Hence, this tool is commonly used to perform processes such as compliance and auditing. For instance, Thanks to QPR ProcessAnalyzer, EY claims to be able to cover 100 percent of all processes and transactions.
Process Enhancement
- Process mining provides a user-friendly interface for tracking KPI metrics and assisting users in identifying the best and worst-performing processes.
- Identifying process bottlenecks: Process mining may help businesses uncover bottlenecks if some processes aren\’t performing to their full capacity or are delivering low-performance results.
- Suggestions for improvement: While we expect this functionality to become more popular as AI becomes more integrated into process mining, this technology may provide companies with precise recommendations to enhance performance levels.
Difference Between Task Mining vs Process Mining?
Task Mining vs Process Mining: Task mining is related to process mining in that both are aimed at increasing process efficiency. However, there are some minor discrepancies between these two tools
when it comes to understanding the processes.
Process mining focuses on performance indicators and the order of process stages to understand how a process is handled. Businesses may observe the real steps to conduct a process and find bottlenecks using company data such as KPIs for process optimization or uncovering automation possibilities using log files.
On the other hand, task mining employs recordings and images to examine how firms manage a specific procedure. It aids businesses in determining what employees do while doing a task and identifying the most common activities through user interactions. This information is then utilized to enhance the process.
Task mining demonstrates how enterprises may better manage their tasks, while process mining allows them to use corporate data to understand better how well they can perform their processes. Though these are closely connected technologies, in our opinion, they should be employed jointly to maximize their impact and better understand how processes are carried out.
Conclusion
Both Process Mining and Task Mining, as previously discussed, can bring immediate advantages by influencing better resource allocation; but, to maximize the potential value of these tools, they should be seen as individual parts within a wider operational excellence plan.
Hence, combining intelligent automation technologies like RPA, Chatbots, and digital intelligence with Task Mining systems like Optimus Hive gives a strong blend of discovery, analysis, and execution abilities. This is making it easier for businesses to transition from identifying improvement possibilities while providing real-time improvements and efficiency.