What is Process Discovery and its role in an enterprise’s RPA journey?

Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is the critical competitive differentiator for organizations, growing by leaps and bounds following the urgency to automate repetitive back and front-end processes. Process Discovery, on the other hand, is considered the means to shorten the transformation curve to automation.

The COVID pandemic had been the stimulator that enforces businesses to ramp up their digital transformation efforts. Adopting automation to speed up recurring processes is the first stride taken in the said direction. But which business process will benefit more from RPA solutions remains a challenging decision to make. Hence, ML-powered Process Discovery tools are opted by enterprises to help them select the suitable candidate for automation.

What is Process Discovery?

There are probably numerous processes working simultaneously within an organization – each following a unique and distinct roadmap. To bring certain key areas under direct automation, organizations are faced with the challenge of narrowing down to those processes for which automation will deliver the most significant benefit.

Business Process Discovery is the medium helping organizations discover how every process within the company is executed and which process or processes need priority improvement and automation.

Process Discovery tools are incorporated to identify the most recurring and repetitive tasks that are error-prone, time, cost, and labor intensive. By transitioning such processes to automation using RPA bots, companies can meet heightened customer expectations and deliver better employee experiences.

How does Process Discovery work?

Automated Business Process Discovery tools and methods are employed to monitor an organization’s business process using bots for a specified period. They silently run in the background of employees’ systems, collecting valuable data and recording workflows without hampering daily work. These bots carefully note down various applications employees use in different ways to complete specific tasks. Then, advanced ML algorithms are used to analyze the data, identifying workflows that can be moved to an automation tool for seamless journeys.

Benefits of Process Discovery

The following are key benefits of Process Discovery:

How does Process Discovery affect RPA success?

RPA involves automating rule-based recurring workflows. Unfortunately, an organization can comprise millions of such processes involving too many human hands and productive hours. These are repetitive and monotonous, forming an integral part of each system and business process but adding minimal value to employees’ individual growth.

Hence, to speed up such time-intensive tasks, companies are deploying RPA bots, but the latter’s success hinges on being able to identify the right processes to automate accurately. Chances are high for RPA failure if Process Discovery fails to select the deserving processes for automation.

Automated Business Process Discovery leverages intelligent cognitive technologies to evaluate employees’ desktop data and interactions like keystrokes, mouse selections, applications used, pages visited, field entries, and handle time. It continuously maps and ticks off priority processes to create a stream of RPA-friendly process opportunities. This eventually enables businesses to achieve optimum operational efficiency by arresting human errors common in recurring tasks, time, and cost-intensive factors.

Intelligent Process Discovery maximizes ROI by unlocking the actual value of RPA only when the latter is deployed in fitting processes and workflows. Hence, Process Discovery is the first calculative step toward achieving end-to-end business process automation.