From automation to autonomy: Streamlining processes with BPM

Task mining

The capability to discover new processes and tasks to automate is also gaining traction—and importance—in BPM offerings. This capacity reinforces the automation at work in these solutions while spurring the movement toward what Abdulla termed “the autonomous enterprise.” Task mining often involves cognitive computing technologies such as computer vision to monitor the behavior of users and pinpoint areas of automation. Huang characterized task mining as an undertaking that “applies computer vision and tries to identify how a worker is doing their job everyday on the screen, and then provide insights on what can be automated from an RPA perspective.”

Click-screen analysis factors into task mining as well. Employing RPA to find new tasks to automate, in addition to whatever tasks or processes it’s explicitly used to automate, compounds the value of this technology and the effects of enterprise automation within overall BPM solutions. “The expectation is that the end user will go into some system or document, then execute a number of keystrokes or clicks in order to initiate some kind of activity. I see leveraging RPA to click one button to do a number of steps instead of requiring five clicks as a better situation,” Baird commented.

Process mining

Whereas task mining operates on individual tasks that might comprise a business process, process mining considers that process as a whole and denotes areas in which efficiency can be improved. Process mining typically involves analytics, which frequently entails cognitive computing approaches. For example, process mining capabilities might indicate “Steps 1 and 2 are working very well, Steps 6 and 7 are taking 2 weeks, what’s going on?” Huang revealed. “And then, you examine it.” Since it considers business processes from a comprehensive perspective, process mining is a favorable corollary of employing a formal BPM solution—as opposed to compiling different content services for the purpose.

In such an environment, organizations can “uncover hidden inefficiencies or processes that you think might be done to get that organizational understanding of what’s happening and have a system automate them, prioritize them, give you recommendations on how to fix them, and give you tips on how to build them and continually monitor them as you go along,” Abdulla explained. To that end, process mining includes an aspect of root cause analysis. More importantly, perhaps, it reinforces automation, broadens it, and takes organizations closer to autonomous systems that they can oversee, monitor and, as Abdulla put it, ultimately “optimize.”

Business rules management

Business rules play a central role in credible BPM implementations. Those rules dictate that processes work in concert with well-defined business objectives, best practices, and other facets of knowledge management. A best practice for implementing business rules via BPM is to have a repository, or what Huang termed a “business table,” for them, which can help with everything from dynamic case routing to regulatory compliance.

In the international legal and compliance use case Huang described, the organization was able to “have automatic assignment, using a business table, a rules table, so we know if a certain request is coming from Europe or the U.K., then auto assign to this person.” The critical point of distinction of employing a rules table into BPM: It decouples the business logic from the application itself “so the business unit can go in and configure the rules, and they can be pushed into live digital systems without having to wait for IT,” Huang observed.