Why companies should move away from manual process discovery
How automation can help overcome the challenge of accuracy in process identification
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PEX Network recently released its Increasing process discovery’s value through automation report to highlight the major challenges businesses are experiencing with regard to process discovery. The report offers insight on how automation can be applied to process discovery and how algorithms are sharpening the solution’s efficacy.
Below we summarize three of the key takeaways from the report.
Related content: Two key benefits of process discovery
Process complexity and human behavior are two major challenges of manual process identification
While process discovery offers significant advantages with regard to process visibility, it is not without its challenges. Traditional process discovery, which relies on human reporting to gather information about processes, lacks accuracy. This is partly due to the complexity of business processes that hinder humans in their reporting on how process steps are carried out. In effect, they contain many different touchpoints, actions and variations that can be difficult for a human to accurately keep track of.
Anna John, senior process excellence (PEX) professional and transformation architect at financial services organization UAE Exchange, explains in the report: “There are many unseen handshakes like touchpoints, data, tools, systems and documents that work closely together and create event logs when a process is carried out. These handshakes may become unidentified in the end-to-end process.”
This can result in inaccuracies in the reporting of how long they take to perform, compounded by the unpredictable nature of human behavior. There are many different factors that can impact the way a process is completed, meaning that each iteration of the process may be slightly different.
Daniel Peled, vice-president of global strategic sales for Nintex Kryon, notes: “Humans are not structured. We do not do processes step by step as we should, we start a process, go talk to a colleague, answer an email or a phone call and go back to completing it.”
Due to this potential for inaccuracy, many businesses may be looking for technology to improve to process identification.
Automation adds accuracy to process identification
Automation can remove the burden of reporting from employees and allow businesses to document even the most complex processes with confidence that they have been reported accurately.
Business can offload the task of process reporting onto bots that are able to analyze process data without being impacted by personal biases or by errors made due to the complexity of processes. This gives companies significantly more confidence in the accuracy of the event logs that have been generated.
UAE Exchange's John explains: “These automated methods will observe and record every interaction with various systems and create event logs for process modelling.”
Intelligent technologies make automation even more powerful
Algorithms utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies can be applied onto process discovery platforms to automatically detect the tasks, applications, human interactions and variations that make up the execution of a process.
These algorithms operate without the need for supervision, typically sitting at the employee desktop level and automatically recording every keystroke or clicks. This gives businesses complete visibility over how processes are performed, down to every push of a button, allowing a complete view over delays or deviations.
Organizations are also able to automate the analysis of the data collected, providing inferences as to the causes of deviations or delays, and giving them the ability to learn and continuously improve their analysis.
To uncover the full range of insights into how automation enhances process discovery, download PEX Network’s Increasing process discovery’s value through automation report.
Have you noticed the benefits of automating process discovery? Let us know in the comments below
