Process Discovery

Process discovery is a crucial phase that involves identifying, analyzing, and documenting existing business processes to determine which ones are suitable candidates for automation. It's the first step towards implementing successful automation solutions that optimize efficiency, accuracy, and productivity.

Here’s a guide of the steps that we perform in process discovery for our customers:

1. Process Identification: Identify the processes that are repetitive, rule-based, and time-consuming. Look for tasks that are prone to errors or require manual data entry.
2. Process Understanding: Gain a comprehensive understanding of the selected processes. This involves detailed documentation of the process steps, inputs, outputs, decision points, exceptions, and variations. Collaborate with the employees directly involved in the process to gather insights into its nuances.
3. Process Mapping: Create a process map that visually represents the sequence of steps in the processes. This map helps to visualize the entire process, making it easier to identify bottlenecks, redundancies, and opportunities for process improvement.
4. Data Collection: Gather relevant data associated with the processes, such as the types of input data, formats, sources, and the expected output. Understanding the data intricacies to design effective automation workflows.
5. Metrics and KPIs: Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the processes to establish a baseline for measuring the success of the automated solutions.
6. Process Analysis: Analyze the processes to identify its suitability for automation by relevant factors such as rule-based nature, frequency of occurrence, volume of data, and potential ROI from automation. Prioritize those that align with automation's strengths.
7. Process Complexity Assessment: Evaluate the complexity of the processes and identify potential challenges that could arise during automation.
8. Automation Feasibility: Assess the feasibility of automating the processes. Determine if the necessary data and systems are accessible for automation, and whether automation can be done without significant disruption to existing operations.
9. Cost-Benefit Analysis: Perform a cost-benefit analysis to understand the potential Return on Investment (ROI) from automating the processes. Estimate the upfront costs of implementing automation tools, development time, expected efficiency gains, error reduction, and long-term savings.
10. Prioritization: Rank the identified processes based on their potential impact, feasibility, complexity, and ROI to decide which processes to automate first and in what sequence.