Automation is the future. Most organizations―and likely yours as well―have automation as one of its key priorities for 2019 and beyond. But you may be asking yourself, where should we begin this journey toward automation?
Before you break out any automation tools, it’s critical that you first identify and map out exactly which processes are best to automate. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is typically a good fit for automating back office processes, especially repetitive or manual tasks, as well as for augmenting the work of your employee workforce.
How do you identify which processes to automate? Very often, a good guess or feeling helps to identify first good candidates, but are those the right ones?
Some organizations have a Center of Excellence (COE) in place that collects ideas for process automation, takes a closer look at it and prioritizes it accordingly. The COE does some type of process discovery, but it’s all very manual; for example, looking over the shoulder of the employees or even sometimes videotaping them to see what can be automated. That’s all very time-consuming, and if you look at the entire project, the discovery phase likely takes most of the time, and with that, creates most of the costs. Implementing RPA robots is fast, once you know exactly what you want to automate.
Automated Process Discovery helps organizations to speed up the task selection process by recording, mapping and analyzing targeted business processes, applications and actions performed by the employees. It provides insight into existing processes and tasks, and helps to identify repetitive tasks that can be performed or supported by RPA robots.
With Automated Process Discovery, you gain insights into “in-practice” processes and often, processes that aren’t documented―all without interrupting the user and the user’s desktop. Capture and record central user-generated activities such as mouse clicks, keyboard strokes and application actions, and perform low-impact process discovery on recorded and logged user interactions data. The derived information on user activities can be easily visualized and helps to build robots much quicker and more accurately since all process steps are documented, including exception paths that occur.
Process discovery is an important step right at the beginning of your automation journey, empowering organizations to pinpoint top money and time-saving automation opportunities. Automated Process Discovery should be your tool of choice when you look at Intelligent Automation solutions. If you want to know more about it, check out the new release of Kofax RPA 10.4 with the new Automated Process Discovery capability.