Task Mining and Process Mining – are they independent solutions or can they work together?

Good question, right?

It’s true that both Task Mining and Process Mining solutions can be set to work independently - they provide very different data insights.

However, as the technologies have matured in the last few years we have heard from both our own customers and process mining vendors that Task Mining and Process Mining can work together to create incredibly powerful business process diagnostics.

Let’s consider this commonly cited example.

We know that Process Mining can often identify an issue in a particular process, but is not particularly useful for pinpointing the exact cause of the problem, because it does not collect all the relevant data.

In simple terms, while analysing and optimizing an end-to-end process with Process Mining, a bottleneck may be identified, but because it cannot collect all the relevant data, it cannot tell you where.

Therefore, taking a closer look at the process in question will often lead to a ‘dead end’, because the root cause may not be related to that particular process but another, totally separate one.

The reason is often found to be that the department responsible for performing the step causing the bottleneck is simply unaware of the issue because it manifests itself elsewhere.

In this instance the benefit of Task Mining is that, unlike Process Mining, it can capture the data of all the activities in the given department, analyse it, and optimize the step in question with the aim of eliminating any activity that brings little value or that can be automated.

Which solution do you use? Task mining or process mining? Contact us to learn how to use them together effectively.