How effective are your employees? What steps can you take to boost productivity? Which tasks are best suited for RPA automation? While we don’t have all the answers, we do know about a powerful tool that can help: task mining. This tool can be your first step toward streamlining workflows and embracing automation.
What Is Task Mining and How Does It Work?
Task mining is a discovery tool designed to capture user interaction data at the desktop level. It tracks actions such as mouse clicks, keystrokes, and data entries required for specific tasks, like updating spreadsheets, entering patient information into an EHR, or processing a sales order.
Using technologies like OCR (optical character recognition), NLP (natural language processing), and ML (machine learning), task mining software collects and analyzes these actions. The resulting data is compiled into screenshots, screen recordings, or activity logs, including details like timestamps and time spent on specific activities or applications.
This data gives managers and team leaders valuable insights into how tasks are performed across individuals or entire departments. With task mining, inefficiencies can be identified, workflows can be better understood, and opportunities for optimization can be discovered. It’s also an excellent tool for determining whether automation solutions, such as RPA, are the right choice to enhance team productivity.
Who Can Benefit from Task Mining?
Task mining is a versatile tool that is not confined to any single industry. Any organization that depends on desktop tasks can utilize task mining to improve efficiency and drive innovation.
Here are three key sectors that widely adopt task mining to enhance their operations:
Healthcare
Hospitals and healthcare providers use task mining to lower claim denial rates and reduce manual paperwork, making their financial workflows more efficient. Additionally, task mining aids in improving clinical care management, scheduling, recruitment, and overall patient experience.
Finance and Banking
In the finance sector, task mining helps streamline credit management, mitigate risks, and automate payment processes. By optimizing end-to-end workflows, banks enhance the client experience, from the know-your-customer process to ongoing customer support.
Manufacturing
In manufacturing, task mining is invaluable for refining operations across production, supply chain management, inventory tracking, and restocking. It also accelerates back-office processes, such as accounts payable/receivable, order processing, and supplier evaluation.
What Are the Advantages of Task Mining?
Task mining revolves around gaining insights: it offers invaluable data on how tasks are carried out, what works effectively, what doesn’t, and where improvements can be made. The key direct advantages of task mining include:
Data-driven decision-makingIdentifying automation opportunities, bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for improvementImproved KPIs and performance monitoringBy acting on these insights, task mining also brings indirect—yet highly impactful—benefits to organizations, such as:
Responsibilities of Python Automation Engineers:
With a wide variety of task mining tools available, businesses can easily select the one that aligns best with their size, objectives, and team characteristics. Based on our experience with organizations across different industries, KYP.AI stands out as one of the most adaptable and powerful task-mining tools.
KYP.AI utilizes AI to recommend the most effective automation and optimization strategies for each specific scenario. It captures task data in near real-time, visualizes it, and provides suggestions for improvements that offer the highest results with minimal effort.
After implementing the suggested improvements, KYP.AI tracks the adoption rate and impact, ensuring that your transformation is fully optimized. All insights and findings are presented in a user-friendly dashboard, providing a comprehensive view of opportunities across all teams and applications.
Another viable option is leveraging task mining features integrated within automation platforms. This combination facilitates a seamless transition of findings to the automation team and accelerates the discovery process. UiPath, our preferred RPA tool, offers task mining capabilities as part of its platform.
UiPath Task Mining offers two methods of task discovery: Assisted task mining, which focuses on understanding and standardizing known tasks by capturing all their variations, and Unassisted task mining, which automatically records user activity to identify new tasks and opportunities for automation.
UiPath Task Mining integrates natively with other UiPath discovery tools, such as Process Mining and Communications Mining, providing businesses with a comprehensive view of their operations. All insights are consolidated in Automation Hub, a central dashboard for managing and prioritizing automation efforts.
Task Mining: Getting Started
Single-Project Task Mining
The objective here is to develop a task-mining proof-of-concept within a single department. Based on the results of this PoC, tasks are then automated using RPA. This approach is quicker to implement and requires fewer resources, making it ideal for smaller organizations. However, it's important to note that a one-time project may not provide the same level of comprehensive insights as a long-term discovery process.
Ongoing Discovery and Optimization
In this method, task mining is carried out across departments, assessing workflows throughout the organization while gradually constructing automation pipelines. Continuous task mining and automation is more costly, complex, and time-intensive than one-off projects. Nevertheless, it delivers significant advantages, including detailed insights, ongoing improvement, and a comprehensive view of business processes.
Whether you're exploring whether RPA can boost productivity or diving deep into your workflows, task mining helps you uncover the answers. Reach out to learn more about your processes and embark on your digital transformation journey with task mining and RPA.
