The benefits of introducing process mining are not limited to business visualization – maximizing automation effects by linking with RPA
Amidst the wave of DX (Digital Transformation), there is a growing movement to fundamentally review business processes and promote automation. Accurate understanding of business processes in advance through process mining is essential to maximizing the effect. Koichi Hasegawa, CEO of UiPath, who took the stage at the "Process Mining Conference 2022 LIVE" (sponsored by Impress IT Leaders) held online on June 22, said that RPA vendor UiPath will provide process mining. In addition to explaining the significance of this, Mr. Ken Natsume, an evangelist at the company's solution division, introduced points on how to draw out the effects of combining with RPA.
Collaboration between RPA and process mining is “inevitable”
As an RPA vendor, UiPath has been recognized as a leader in multiple third-party surveys, and is leading the RPA industry.In recent years, its reputation as a vendor that provides process mining tools has also increased. Koichi Hasegawa, Representative Director and CEO of the Japanese subsidiary, said, "While focusing on digital robots and the people who use them, UiPath will change from a company that provides RPA to a company that provides end-to-end automation solutions. I am trying,” he explains.
Against the backdrop of DX, companies are rapidly improving their business processes. The challenge is to understand the business process in advance. Mr. Hasegawa says, "Without that, it is impossible to specifically predict the effects of improvements. Given the number of business issues, it becomes difficult to make appropriate decisions about what to tackle first." .
However, understanding business processes is not an easy task. The conventional method using interviews and questionnaires not only increases costs and time, but human subjectivity prevents accurate visualization. The real solution to overcome this is process mining, which visualizes business processes accurately in a short period of time based on the objective facts of data.
UiPath's Japanese subsidiary has been paying attention to the importance of process mining from early on, and since 2018, before UiPath provided its own process mining tool, the Japanese subsidiary's own " provided an RPA scout service.
“I advised the head office that unless we create a single service that fuses process mining and RPA, we will not be able to bring out the overwhelming benefits of automation,” says Mr. Hasegawa. In response, the head office moved swiftly. In 2019, it acquired ProcessGold, a Dutch process mining tool vendor, and started offering it as its own product "UiPath Process Mining"
Mr. Hasegawa says that the advantage of combining process mining and RPA is that "we can accurately identify areas where processing is taking a long time, areas where troublesome work is required, repetitive work, etc., and quickly automate them." We can improve the process while looking at the results." In addition, he says, "There is also the advantage of being able to control and assess risks by monitoring the process, rather than just executing the process."
Visualize the business process with process mining, discover the parts that need automation, and automate with RPA. Measure automated results with process mining. Based on the results, a routine can be run to improve the automation method. “Process mining will become important in order to review, update, and increase the value of what has been created once,” says Mr. Hasegawa.
Execute improvement actions after discovering issues with RPA
Ken Natsume, an evangelist at UiPath's Solution Division, explained the usefulness of UiPath's process mining tool as follows. “There are multiple solutions that implement improvement actions after visualization by process mining. Among them, RPA, which can achieve flexible automation, is the best solution for responding to the diverse and wide-ranging needs of Japanese companies.”
When introducing a process mining tool, we are concerned about whether we can really import our own data, whether we can master the process mining tool, and whether we can analyze the data of our system.
UiPath Process Mining provides a template called "UiPath Connector" for data acquisition and processing, and supports not only SAP, Salesforce, and Oracle, but also in-house developed systems. Application templates are also available for expressing data in graphs and charts, and dozens of interfaces are provided.
In addition, various analysis dashboards are implemented as standard for analysis purposes such as root cause analysis, variance analysis, repetitive processing, process comparison, and automation utilization. Through the use of them, even the first process mining can be analyzed at a certain level or higher.
Consistent coverage from problem discovery to countermeasures and RPA utilization
Process mining visualizes a company's business processes and discovers bottlenecks. In some cases, there may not be enough data to analyze and a different approach is needed,” says Natsume.
That's why UiPath has a set of tools that work in tandem with UiPath Process Mining. Task mining tool ``UiPath Task Mining'', ``UiPath Task Capture'' that records work on a PC and automatically generates documents, and ``UiPath Automation Hub'' that registers and centrally manages automation targets from various places
“By utilizing Task Mining, we can investigate the causes of bottlenecks discovered by Process Mining by digging deeper into individual tasks. By analyzing the data collected by Task Capture with Automation Hub, we can make tasks suitable for automation. From there, you can automatically generate workflows, which are business process definitions and RPA blueprints, with a single click.Ascertain how to solve the problems you discover, and even use workflows such as RPA You can smoothly connect to automation by using it.” (Mr. Natsume)
UiPath's dashboard has many templates for monitoring processing load, processing time, various lead times, legal violations, etc. By adding KPIs to it, it can be used as a unique business monitoring dashboard.
In addition, if an environment where RPA digital robots are automatically executed immediately when problems such as compliance violations are discovered, it will be possible to respond to problems at an early stage, and human judgment can be inserted before the actions of the digital robots. , it is possible to respond flexibly according to the situation.
Rapid expansion of users with both SaaS and on-premise products
UiPath offers these process mining products in both SaaS and on-premise formats and is described as "improving throughput time by reducing operational costs and speeding up processes, reducing human work time, and reducing work time." It is used to solve a variety of problems, such as reducing errors and violations,” says Natsume.
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