Process discovery vs. process mining: What’s the difference?

What is the most efficient, reliable way to decide which work processes your company should automate?

It wasn’t that long ago that there really was only one way for companies to make these choices: through expensive, subjective decision-making processes that could involve many employees, take a long time, and suffer from bias and disagreement.

Then companies started using process mining tools that would automatically identify, analyze, and recommend processes to automate – using objective analysis of hard, empirical data to shorten the path to RPA and add a new degree of certainty to automation decisions. Until recently, these tools were the obvious choice for any company looking for a more automatic way to decide which processes to automate.

Today, however, Nintex Kryon’s innovative Process Discovery solution offers businesses a faster and more flexible approach.

To understand how Kryon Process Discovery is different from conventional process mining tools, it’s important to understand how both solutions gather data, what they aim to accomplish by analyzing those data, and how they relate to RPA.

How do Conventional Process Mining Tools Work?

At the heart of process mining solutions is the analysis of system event logs.

By analyzing these logs through sophisticated algorithms, process mining tools can automatically identify and evaluate automatable work processes. These tools can also be used to find an organization’s inefficiencies in order to correct them. Additionally, some process mining solutions can be used to test the accuracy of a given process map.

However, when it comes to RPA-related information, system event logs have a few shortcomings:

• They often don’t provide readily usable information about actions performed within certain software environments, like legacy systems and Citrix.
• Interpreting these logs through conventional process mining tools typically requires the work of five to 10 employees (some with a business background and others with a technical background), usually over a period of one to four months.
• The process mining solutions that rely on these logs are typically separate from RPA solutions, even if there is some degree of integration between the two systems. As a result, once a company decides which tasks to automate, employees must create the relevant automated workflows from scratch within their RPA platform.

How is Nintex Kryon Process Discovery Different?

In contrast to conventional process mining tools, Process Discovery is designed specifically to streamline the process of planning and implementing RPA.

Instead of relying on system event logs, Process Discovery comes with advanced visual recognition that can gather essential data on employees’ work processes in real time. As a result, it is fully compatible with all types of software.

Additionally, because it is a user-friendly solution designed to be easily accessible to those without a technical background, Process Discovery can be easily managed by just one to four users – typically only taking three to five weeks.

But perhaps the most important factor differentiating it from process mining is that only Process Discovery automatically creates workflows for each process that it identifies. As a result, Process Discovery – unlike process mining – can save you the time of creating automated workflows from scratch using your RPA platform.

Overall, while there are many differences between the two technologies, they largely boil down to one main distinction: Unlike process mining, Kryon Process Discovery was built from the ground up specifically for RPA – which is why it offers you a faster, more flexible, more comprehensive, and more cost-effective approach to automatically identifying and analyzing automatable work processes.

Want to learn more?  And to see Process Discovery in action, schedule a live demo today.

 

 

Interested in learning more about Nintex Kryon RPA and what it can do for your organization? Click here to request a demo.