Process Intelligence: What Is It? And Why It Matters for RPA

Why Process Intelligence is essential for your Intelligent Automation Journey

To succeed at intelligent automation, you need complete visibility into processes. But gaining complete visibility of your operations can be difficult. Often requiring intense manual effort from your analysts and Center of Excellence (CoE) teams.

So, how can you move from manual and limited process discovery to knowing all the right processes to automate? Using process Intelligence, your analysts and CoE team can gain full visibility of how processes actually work. This allows them to see what to processes automate and which ones need optimizing

What Is Process Intelligence?

Process Intelligence brings together the best aspects of process mining, task mining, and business intelligence. By using Process Intelligence, you can transform how your processes work through process discovery, analysis, and optimization. This lets you scale your automation faster by identifying the right processes and running them at peak performance.

Process Intelligence Vs Traditional Process Discovery

Traditional manual methods of discovering and automating processes tend to be lengthy and costly. Months and years may pass while processes are mapped and automated. During that time, you may miss market opportunities.

Building a true picture of business processes with the limited information associated with manual process discovery may result in not choosing the right automation opportunities. It’s no good to rely on anecdotal evidence when in reality workers across the organization are using different process variants to reach the same goal.

Process intelligence tools do the heavy groundwork to identify which processes should be automated to best support human skills. The tools also accelerate time to value by managing and optimizing automated processes and achieving a much faster return on your automation investment.

"To succeed at automation, organizations, and automation teams must invest in technologies such as process mining and analytics to understand complex processes better and ascertain their suitability for automation.”

Forrester Getting Intelligent Automation Right

What is Process Mining?

Process mining software uses data from your systems to help you discover, monitor, and improve real processes. It uses event log data to accurately create process models on how your processes are executed.

What Is the Difference between Process Mining and Process Intelligence?

Some process mining tools may not be able to connect with certain types of data sources or may struggle with complex processes. Process mining is great at looking at real-world data to analyze processes retrospectively but doesn’t let you monitor current processes.

Process Intelligence combines process mining, task mining, and business intelligence-like metrics to provide deep insights into business processes. Its numerical deep-dive analysis works well on all types of processes, no matter how many data sources are involved or how complex a process may be.

Unlike other tools, Process Intelligence can monitor processes in real-time. This means that process owners can be alerted to errors and deviations, improving how the business operates.

What Are the Benefits of Process Intelligence for RPA and IA?

Outcome-focused insights

Process intelligence provides valuable insights into what automations deliver the best outcomes. Process intelligence uncovers delays, and bottlenecks, and reveals duplicates. It identifies opportunities where you can optimize processes for both digital workers and people.

Full visibility to understand processes

You can visualize highly variable processes in different dimensions, from optimal/happy path to highest ROI. In the design stage, this visualization of the ‘warts and all’ reality of the workflow supports optimum process automation design.

An accelerated automation journey

Process intelligence reduces the time for process discovery and helps accelerate each step of automation. Allowing you to scale your automation faster as you develop process automations in a matter of days.

Process optimization

You can see opportunities for continuous optimization all in a single view. Process intelligence tools support broader process lifecycle management and continuous improvement, by monitoring processes in near-real time and analyzing performance data. Armed with this insight, you can continue to optimize processes to respond to market changes or a new business goal. You can even modify the process in real-time, while the rest of the organization continues to run.

Automated governance and compliance

It’s straightforward to define and track process rules that align with compliance and governance goals – based on a solid and reliable data-driven foundation.

Optimized automations running at peak performance

Knowing what processes to automate for the greatest returns prepares you to run at peak performance when you run your processes on the intelligent automation platform, so you can seamlessly access the Business Process Management (BPM) that will take your automations to the next level.

“BPM is going to provide the ability to orchestrate beyond what just human workers or automations could do, bringing them all together.”

Lou Bachenheimer, CTO Americas at SS&C Blue Prism

Defining Intelligent Automation (IA)

Intelligent Automation (IA) is the combination of multiple automation technologies. It includes business process management (BPM), robotic process automation (RPA), and artificial intelligence (AI). Together these technologies automate business processes and streamline and scale decision-making across organizations.

How Does SS&C Blue Prism Process Intelligence work?

5 Step Guide to How Process Intelligence Works

Process Intelligence easily integrates into each step of your automation lifecycle. It uses process mining, task mining, and business intelligence to discover, analyze and optimize your processes. You can then take these new insights to automate or manage your processes.

But how does it work? And, what does it deliver at each stage? Let’s look at the 4 areas where it can help.

Establish Baseline

Rapidly compare people, processes, and systems against best practices. Knowing the initial state of any process enables you to track process automation benefits with more precision.

Discovery

In the discovery stage, process intelligence creates an unfiltered history of every process. It does this using task and process mining to extract data from systems and user interfaces. The data is then turned into visualizations of how processes are performed. This gives you a complete view of each process on a dashboard.

Analyze

On the dashboard, you can see the process steps, variations, and bottlenecks. You can then use process modeling to look at root cause analysis, and process variations, and see the different possible outcomes with each variation of the process. From there, you can feed the processes into machine learning tools that recommend a ‘happy path’. This helps guide you to deliver the best outcome from your processes– whether that’s cost reduction, time savings, or ROI.

Learn more about business process analysis (BPA)

Automate

Once you’ve analyzed the processes, you can then look at what processes to automate. Think about whether the process needs a human touch, or whether it’s suited to automation. It’s key to remember that you shouldn’t necessarily automate everything and be wise with what you pick. Once you’ve picked processes to automate, you can export the process skeleton to design studio to automate. 

Optimize

Now that you’ve looked at what processes to automate, you can turn your attention to what to optimize. In any organization, processes can always be improved, and business process management (BPM) tools are perfectly placed to help. What’s more, by integrating BPM and Process intelligence you can get your processes running at peak performance. You can achieve this by using process intelligence to see what processes to manage, modify or optimize. And, then use BPM to execute the changes, so you can stay compliant and run at peak performance.

Process Intelligence Case Studies

Process Intelligence in Financial Services

A financial services firm, with over $1 trillion under management and more than five million clients, needed to monitor compliance with investor onboarding to mitigate regulatory risk. Previously, the firm was only able to monitor 15% of the processes. Working with SS&C Blue Prism, the firm has automated the identification and monitoring of 100% of its transactions, resulting in cost savings in the region of $2m a year. It has reduced the risks of compliance violations, and exposure to fines or reputation damage.

Process Intelligence Healthcare

Canadian Healthcare Organization

A leading Canadian healthcare organization has big ambitions for its automation program. Its IA journey with SS&C Blue Prism began in January 2021. In the summer of 2022, the organization launched a process and task-mining project. By April 2024, it expects to exceed savings of $4.7m.

It plans to extend SS&C Blue Prism Process Intelligence to automate further processes within finance, HR staff scheduling, and IT and expects to improve employee satisfaction, increase operational efficiency and productivity, improve operational agility, and reduce operational risk.

Process Intelligence Healthcare: US Healthcare Provider

A US healthcare provider faced the challenge of making sure every patient’s insurance is verified before providing services. Yet the process of verifying all patient insurance prior to arrival exposed the healthcare provider to increased costs due to superfluous insurance verifications.

Blue Prism Process Intelligence identified four duplicate insurance verification checks per visit on average, resulting in potential cost savings of $5.5m a year from eliminating duplication and automating the process. The worst offender ran 125 duplicate insurance verifications in one day.

Process Intelligence Insurance

The Uniqa Insurance Group AG is one of the largest insurance groups in Austria and Central and Eastern Europe. They support approximately 10.5 million customers with insurance products and services. Uniqa has scaled its intelligent automation program to include 12 departments, 36 live processes, and 200k transactions.

Over the last year, they’ve tried multiple process mining and task mining tools. But, they found many on the market that needed to be required extensive data manipulation. In contrast, SS&C Blue Prism’s Process Intelligence (BPPI) made it easy to get the actionable insights they wanted.

"Companies that take a more strategic approach to IA unlock up to five times more business value than those simply focusing on ROI from automating individual tasks."

Knowledge Capital Partners

Process Intelligence: Key Takeaways

• Process intelligence is the key to identifying the best processes to automate and get the most out of RPA and IA
• Process intelligence helps you discover, analyze, automate, and optimize your processes faster
• Process intelligence ensures that your processes are compliant and work at peak performance
• Process intelligence can play a significant role in delivering optimum customer and employee journeys
• Process intelligence helps you scale faster and expand the scope of your automation

Learn how easy it is to get started with Process Intelligence, with a Process Intelligence free 30-day trial that comes with a comprehensive starter kit.