Process Mining Demystified: Step-by-Step Guide to Taking Action

Introduction

This blog is the fourth in a series of blogs called UiPath Process Mining Demystified. Before reading this blog, we recommend reading the first blog on connecting and transforming data, the second blog on creating a Process Mining dashboard, and the third blog on effective analysis. UiPath Process Mining is a versatile tool with various functionalities. However, in this blog post, we will specifically highlight its usefulness for automation users. We will demonstrate how Process Mining can enable you to take proactive measures, gain insights, and assess the potential for automation effectively.

Automation potential

The Automation Potential dashboard is a valuable tool for identifying potential automation candidates within your process. By using this dashboard, you can track automated activities, assess the automation rate, evaluate the manual processing time required by users, and analyze costs and full-time equivalents (FTEs) associated with the process. You can find the Automation Potential tab in the top left corner of your dashboard.

To guarantee the proper functioning of the Automation Potential dashboard, it is crucial to provide that the 'Automated' field is not null at data ingestion time. This field serves as a prerequisite for displaying accurate results and identifying potential automation opportunities effectively.

Initially, you might observe that your systems lack event start times, resulting in higher-than-expected manual processing time. This is because the durations are calculated from the end time of the previous event to the end time of the current event, which includes waiting time and may not align with ideal scenarios. To provide more realistic durations, you have the option to customize this aspect within the automation estimates raw seed file.

Refer to our docs on how you can customize the seed file and see updated metrics. 

Simulating automation potential

Once you have identified an activity that appears suitable for automation, it is essential to assess its potential return on investment (ROI). Within the table, each activity is equipped with a Simulate toggle, allowing you to enable or disable simulations. When you activate the switch for the first simulation, a drawer will appear on the right side, presenting three straightforward questions based on years of automation experience from UiPath. These questions are designed to calculate an automation potential rate effectively.

The three questions are as follows:

• How many ways are there to complete the process?

• When considering data input from documents or forms, what percentage of it is already digital?

• Among these documents, what percentage is structured?

By answering these questions, the simulation will generate a new automation rate and provide an estimated processing time for the simulated scenario. This allows you to compare and evaluate the difference between the current "as-is" scenario and the simulated scenario. Furthermore, you can enhance your analysis by adding more columns to the table using the Column Picker. This feature enables you to incorporate additional data points, facilitating a comprehensive understanding of the ROI for various aspects within your application. By utilizing these simulation capabilities and expanding the table with relevant columns, you can gain valuable insights into the potential ROI of automating specific activities, enabling informed decision making regarding automation implementation.

UiPath Business Automation Platform integration

Automation Hub integration

As you dive deeper into your process analysis, you're likely to uncover valuable ideas for improvement, be it automation opportunities or process enhancements. To effectively capture and track these ideas, Process Mining offers seamless integration with Automation Hub. Here's how you can leverage this feature to store and manage your improvement ideas.

• Activity selection and sending to Automation Hub: while exploring the process graph or automation potential dashboard, you can select a specific activity that sparks an idea for improvement.

• Providing supplemental information: within the Automation Hub drawer, you can fill in the necessary details and supply supplemental information related to your idea. This could include specific insights, suggestions, or additional context that'll aid the center of excellence (CoE) in processing and assessing the idea effectively. By providing comprehensive information, you enhance the chances of your idea being thoroughly evaluated.

• Submitting the idea: once you have filled in all the required information, you can submit the form within the Automation Hub drawer. This action initiates the creation of a dedicated idea within Automation Hub, ensuring that your improvement suggestion is accurately recorded and logged for future tracking and assessment.

By leveraging the integration between Process Mining and Automation Hub, you can seamlessly capture and document your improvement ideas in a centralized location. This streamlined process allows your CoE to efficiently review, assess, and prioritize these ideas, leading to informed decision making and successful implementation of automation and process improvements.

Task Mining integration

With the introduction of the integration between Process Mining and Task Mining in 2023.5, a powerful combination is now at your disposal. Process Mining's system-level visibility can be complemented by Task Mining to fill in any gaps that may exist with applications that cannot be directly ingested into the Process Mining app. Here's how you can leverage this integration from the process graph, automation, potential dashboard, and root cause analysis dashboard:

• Assisted and unassisted task mining projects: within the‌ dashboards, you can create both assisted and unassisted task mining projects. These projects serve different purposes in capturing valuable insights and data from your processes.

• Prerequisites for integration: before you proceed with task mining integration, make sure you meet the following prerequisites. Task Mining is enabled in your tenant: ensure that Task Mining is activated and available within your environment or organization. Admin or project creator role in Task Mining: to create and manage task mining projects, you need to have administrative privileges or be designated as a project creator in Task Mining. Enough AI Units for unassisted task mining: unassisted task mining, which leverages AI capabilities, may require an adequate number of AI Units to be available in your environment. Make sure you have plenty AI Units to trigger unassisted task mining as needed.

Automation integration

With the introduction of the automation triggering feature in Process Mining apps in 2023.4, users now have the capability to initiate automations directly from within the app. However, before this functionality can be utilized, analysts need to configure UiPath Queues within the Process Mining app. See our docs for setting up automation integration.

Now that the queues are linked, business users can filter for cases within the Process Mining app to trigger the associated automations. For each filtered case, a transaction item will be created within the automation queue, ready for a robot to pick up and execute. Ensure that the number of filtered cases does not exceed the queue limit defined in the Automation Manager. By configuring the automation queue within Process Mining apps, you can seamlessly trigger automations based on specific cases, streamlining and optimizing your processes with the power of automation..