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 desktop data.

Business data lies in your transactional 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.

Desktop 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 executes — not just process-wise, but people-wise, too. 

The benefits of Task Mining

Task Mining can be hugely beneficial to any enterprise, as it lets you:

• Uncover inefficiencies in manual work patterns outside of your transactional systems

• Measure and optimize your workforce productivity

• Link manual processes with your enterprise business processes and drive next-best-actions across your teams’ desktops

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 that users are interacting with. This is how it works:

1. Capture desktop data

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

2. Add business 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

3. Cluster activities

Leveraging Natural Language Processing (NPL) 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’.

4. 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.

5. Optimize outcomes

Leverage Task Mining data to increase your execution capacity and ultimately your business performance using an Execution Management System.

The real gold mine is in the last three steps.

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 when it comes to sheer complexity, business data has absolutely nothing on desktop 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 your execution. 

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 uses enterprise-ready data obfuscation and privacy control:

• Deny/allowlist applications: choose the websites and applications that are included in the data collection. 

• Hide sensitive data entries, e.g. usernames, passwords, etc. or other PII data.

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

EMS, now with the power of Task Mining

The Celonis Execution Management System combines business data collection and desktop data collection capabilities to give the most complete view of how work gets done inside organizations.

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

Measure execution capacity, know where the execution gaps are, and take action to eliminate them to achieve breakthrough performance.