Learn the difference between task and process mining, the techniques and technologies used to analyze them, and why you should consider both to improve operational efficiency.
Why do I need Task mining in my company?
By gathering and analyzing data from user interaction, companies can track individual tasks and make data-driven process improvement decisions. This allows companies to properly track key performance indicators (KPIs), which are often overlooked by managers. Furthermore, it ensures businesses comply with any regulations that are increased. It can be used complementary to Process Mining techniques.
What is Task Mining?
Task Mining gives businesses the ability to study how their employees work through data gathered from their applications and desktop. This technology allows them to improve how they perform tasks. Exemplary steps are open SAP, login, click on PO, select invoice number, press OK, etc. By analyzing in detail how employees work through applications, it determines what tasks employees perform repeatedly. This allows the software to automatically identify workflows and aggregate individual processes into a complete process map. This speeds up the process of automating manual tasks. The technologies used include data mining, pattern recognition, natural language processing, and optical character recognition techniques (OCR). By tracking human-system interactions at the keystroke level, task mining adds objective and detailed intelligence, eliminating any subjectivity from the automation planning process.
These are the most common use cases where task mining is employed:
- Discovering Automation Opportunities
- Unifying Process Variants for Higher Efficiency
- Improving User Experience
- Discarding Redundant Steps or Actions
What is the difference between process Mining and Task Mining?
Both Process Mining and task mining are suitable solutions for enterprises, but each has different purposes and applications.
Process mining is the technology that helps to uncover entire business processes in your organization. It is a technique that marries the concept of data science with process science to discover, monitor and improve the actual process (not the assumed process) by extracting knowledge from event logs that are available in the different systems.
Task mining discovers the tasks that complete the individual steps of that business process. It is a complementary approach to process mining that infers useful information from low-level event data available in UI logs or captured through the desktop. These logs describe the single steps done by a user based on keystrokes, mouse clicks, data entries, copying, and pasting.
When used in complementary ways, they Process and Task Mining help process analysts and business stakeholders analyze and optimize their operations at multiple levels.
Task mining is less popular in comparison to process mining, but trends are indicating growth in task mining in the coming years.
Contact us and become an expert in processes
At OptiMinds we ensure our customers are focusing on core processes and work with consistent best practices and state of the art applications to ensure maximum effectiveness and efficiency. Measure, manage and reduce your organization’s administrative tasks and bottlenecks to work faster, more conveniently and at lower cost. We want people to truly become an expert in processes, not processing. If you are interested or want to see a demo, contact us!