Going Beyond Traditional Task Mining

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What exactly is "task mining"? In the rapidly evolving landscape of enterprise software, "task mining" has emerged as a new solution category that aims to complement process mining. The general consensus is that task mining encompasses monitoring of user activities on the desktop, typically through screen scraping or object recognition, to identify automation opportunities. Many task mining solutions in the market today do just that and do it well. However, task mining can be a lot more than that.  

Process-focused organizations are often unaware that task mining can support a much wider set of use cases.  Most of these use cases require deeper analytical capabilities to produce a higher resolution view of user activities. Knoa’s task mining solution takes this approach, by supporting more detailed metrics for a broad range of use cases and business processes. 

1.     Task Mining for Help Desk Optimization: Help Desk agents need a full audit trail of user behavior inside mission critical applications in order to diagnose issues effectively. This entails being able to pinpoint user actions, identify error occurrences, assess system performance, and evaluate periods of user inactivity. The objective is to facilitate faster issue diagnosis and resolution. 

2.     Task Mining for Process Optimization: Task mining is key in streamlining process execution. Are users conforming with established process flows, are they compliant with security and regulatory requirements, are they introducing errors, are they causing delays, are they encumbered by application or process design issues? 

3.     Task Mining for User Adoption and Enablement: The adoption of new applications and processes is crucial for organizational efficiency. Task mining facilitates insights into user proficiency, identifies skill gaps, and aids in tailoring training or guidance programs to enhance overall user productivity. 

4.     Task Mining for S/4HANA and Cloud Migrations: In the context of migration projects, real-time access to user behavior analytics is essential at every stage of the migration cycle: during the blueprinting phase, during the UAT cycle as well as post-migration. Enabling proactive support during the hyper care period or measuring the business impact of IT changes are just a few of the many benefits.

Knoa's task mining solution distinguishes itself by generating granular user and task analytics, specifically tailored for SAP systems and other mission-critical applications.  

A comprehensive and versatile task mining solution needs to provide a broad set metrics, including the following: 

• User adoption: understand how well users are adopting new applications and business processes by measuring both the user activity and inactivity  
• User experience: understand the actual end-user experience when interacting with the software by measuring the end-to-end response time for every transaction, as well as the rate of errors  
• User performance: understand how well users are performing their tasks (speed and quality of execution)   
• User journeys: get a detailed log of user interactions with the software, to be able to accurately reproduce process execution flows, identify bottlenecks, and verify compliance 

When evaluating a Task Mining solution for your SAP project, consider the following key factors: 

• Alignment with Objectives: Assess whether the task mining solution aligns with your objectives of improving process execution from both application and user perspectives. 
• Adaptability to Changes: Ensure the task mining solution can seamlessly adapt to changes in your systems and processes, providing continuous support. 
• Operational Efficiency: Evaluate whether the task mining solution is operational from day one, without the need for extensive instrumentation or data modeling. 
• Scalability: Confirm that the task mining solution is scalable, eliminating the need to analyze data for only a sample group of users. 

Choosing the right task mining solution for your project is integral to realizing business benefits across various dimensions. From mitigating risks and delivering cost savings to enhancing operations and overall customer and employee experiences, a strategic task mining approach can yield substantial dividends for both Business and IT stakeholders.