Process Mining is a new Dutch process mining tool that was acquired by UiPath in 2019. It works by analysing a process from start to finish and visualising 100% of cases, therefore, providing full transparency on the business process.

Compared to other new UiPath tools such as Explorer Enterprise and Connect Enterprise, Process Mining differs in that it does not require human interaction, it is technology-led and analyses back-end process logs. Furthermore, while Explorer Enterprise records and allows task mining, Process Mining offers insights into the whole process, start to finish.

In the complete automation journey, Process Mining can be used in the first planning step to understand the process and document it. The gathered information can then be used in building bots and measuring the success. It alleviates the issues that often arise when documenting a process due to missed business cases, unknown errors or subjective views.

Features:

• Process Mining is compatible with Windows, macOS and Linux operating systems,
• Can be used for platforms both on cloud and on premises,
• GDPR compliant,
• Native integration with Python, R, other custom extensions possible.
• Cloud security platform, integrated anonymization algorithms,
• Can handle data sets of >100 mil events,
• Global roll-out support,
• Drill-down options in dashboard.

How it works:

Process Mining connects to input data by accessing business application back-end data and collating it to create a summary of the process and visualise it. It can connect to applications, databases and flat files:

• ERP systems – SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, MS Dynamics 365, Sage, and others.
• BPM/Project Management tools – Jira, ServiceNow, Bizagi, and others.
• Databases – MS SQL, Oracle, MYSQL, MongoDB, Azure Table, Apache Hive, DB2, and others.
• Other data sources – Excel, Google Sheets, CSV, XML, JSON, and others.

Once connected, Process Mining needs to be configured to enable it to translate business outcomes into KPIs and tag each type of transaction. It can extract and compile data logs that relate to the chosen process and transform them into meaningful insights. It will also display any process inefficiencies and bottlenecks, show how much of each step is already automated and allow to continuously monitor the process for future improvement. Finally, it provides the business with the necessary information to choose a process for automation with the highest ROI.

In total, it takes approximately 3 weeks of total implementation time from support to set up. If can be used to analyse data as a one-off or scheduled to update the database each update cycle.

Pricing:

At the moment, Process Mining costs USD $70,000 per process, which is just over $98,000 AUD at the time of writing this (03/08/2020). In addition to that, it will also cost ~ $1300 per analyst user and ~ $7700 per developer user. The price does include full support of roll-out management, version control and fallback options.

Dashboard:

The most impressive feature of the tool is the dashboard and its analytical capabilities. The dashboard allows the user to see the process as an overall summary as well as dig deeper into the fine details.

The main dashboard view gives overall details of the whole process from start to finish. In the provided demo, the given process is invoice processing that has 15 steps and a total of 24450 cases analysed. In the cases tab, it then divides cases into group such as Small invoices, Medium invoices, Employee declaration, etc.

On the right side, the dashboard allows the application of several filters to see different cases, time frames or users in smaller detail.

In the Process view, the dashboard concentrates on the process flow and each different edge case or exception, summarises how many repetitions each activity has, what is already automated and the number of variants.

The Timing view outlines the time taken to complete each case on average, for example, medium invoices take 11 days overall to finish, and insights whether payment deadlines are met, which is crucial to identify bottlenecks and improvement areas.

The Conformance view the user can see a summary of which tags have been used and how they affect the overall process.

The Users view maps out how departments or business units interact with other stakeholders included in the analysed process.

And finally Details view is a log of every case or event that was included in the invoice processing flow.

Process Mining appears to be the most comprehensive and detailed process insights tool at the market available today, however, it does come with a price tag. It is worth weighing out its benefits and drawbacks. While it offers detailed and impressive analysis on the chosen process and provides a strong fact-led basis for process improvement, it is only the first step in the automation journey and further documentation will be required for any development.

Let us know what you think and reach out with any questions you might have regarding Process Mining.