What is Task Mining?

The most important data you have

When it comes to understanding the inherent workings of any enterprise, there are two major sources of data to look at — business data and user interaction data.

Business data lies buried in your operational systems as time-stamped event logs. These reveal every step — and every deviation — that makes up a business process, based on what happened and when. Think things like when a PO was created, approved, fulfilled, dispatched, and so on.

User interaction data is everything your people do in between those steps to make them actually happen. Things like filling in the PO, checking the amounts are correct, matching receipts to invoices, or spending ten minutes on LinkedIn.

Task mining collects and analyzes that data to give enterprises a fuller picture of how their business truly works — not just process-wise, but people-wise, too.

How Task Mining works

At its most basic level, Task Mining collects the actions of the people who are making the business processes happen, automatically detecting the systems users are interacting with.

Task Mining software works like this:

Record interactions

Collecting clicks, scrolls and user actions — complete with time-stamps and screenshots.

Add context

Using Optical Character Recognition — or OCR technology — to collect the words, numbers and additional text on a user’s screen and contextualize what they’re doing

But to get the most value out of Task Mining, you need to go further.

Identify topics and cluster activities

Leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology and AI to automatically understand and sort each action by topic, and then cluster it into activities — like ‘researching sales prospects on LinkedIn’, or ‘approving a purchase order’.

Match them to business data

By identifying User IDs and Case IDs, Task Mining can correlate user interactions with the business data in your operational systems — and understand the impact of each action on your business outcomes.

This is the real gold mine.

Business data is messy. All those different ERP systems, weird data formats and informational black holes can make getting an accurate, moving picture of what your business processes look like difficult.

But business data has nothing, absolutely nothing, on user interaction data — and the many ways that people, in their infinite variety, choose to interact with software.

The beauty of task mining is finding the signal through the noise — the actions that really make a difference to the process.

And by case matching the actions to the business process, you can ultimately track effectiveness against the outcomes that really matter. It elevates Task Mining from a productivity tool to one that can have a real impact on your biggest metrics — growth, innovation, revenue.

That’s what Celonis Task Mining does — and we’re the only ones who do it.

Data security

Task mining is using market leading data obfuscation and privacy control:

• Black/whitelist applications: choose the websites and applications that are included in the data collection.

• Obfuscate data: Choose which data to record. For example, record only the first word of a sentence

• Anonymize data: remove all personally identifiable information and select which inputs you want to hash.

• Manage access rights: select who has access to the data and insights you collect.

The benefits of Task Mining

Task Mining insights can help:

• Identify time-consuming tasks

• Find where work is stuck waiting for human intervention

• Validate the complete and best set of tasks necessary to get work done

• Quantify the value of streamlining processes

But it isn’t simply about automating manual tasks using IT automation or RPA — though that’s obviously one of the possible use cases.

It’s also about:

Identifying and investing in high-value work

Work that can’t be automated, like salespeople researching their prospects before calling them.

Consolidating duplicate or out-of-date systems

Like when your sales teams are still using your old CRM.

Enhancing the user experience of your employees

By improving UI that people struggle to use effectively.

Discovering the key steps to any process

The manual workarounds people use, like steps, like copy/pasting from a spreadsheet to complete an order.

Benchmarking work across divisions

And discovering that a successful sales organization is using one CRM over another.

How Task Mining helps you achieve process excellence

Companies everywhere are scrambling to optimize their processes — because they know great customer experiences are only possible when your processes are working.

Get the processes right, and customer experience will follow. So will revenue, and growth, and all the other good things that drive company performance and strategic objectives.

Task Mining brings in additional data about how people interact with systems to move processes forward, for a fuller picture of how your business works.

Once you’ve got that visibility into how your people interact with your processes you can identify what works, what doesn’t and how to make it better:

Correct

Train employees to do things better.

Streamline

Identify tasks that are ripe for automation — or remove them entirely — so your people can spend their time on what’s actually important.

Optimize

Leverage AI to recommend the best way to do things between each step

Orchestrate

Leverage AI to recommend the best way to do things across every step, no matter what business process we’re dealing with.

Monitor the impact of these behavior changes over time to measure their effectiveness and continuously find new ways to empower your people to work smarter.

Process Mining, now with the power of Task Mining

Here’s the thing. Task mining alone misses the business context needed for companies to derive real value from it.

While you can get powerful process insights from user interaction data, you only get game-changing insights by combining it with business data.

The Celonis Intelligent Business Cloud's combination of business data collection and user interaction data collection capabilities — which is unique in the Process Mining space — gives the most complete view of how work is done inside organizations — and how to optimize for business outcomes, rather than ‘just’ productivity.

Enable the best understanding and more comprehensive optimization of that work, and help your business become the best version of itself.