The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has forced nearly all industries to find newer ways to protect themselves against the virus while also mitigating its long-term impact on the economy. From IT and telecommunications to education, entertainment, and finance sectors, most companies across geographies have switched to remote work models to ensure business continuity, thus minimizing the impact on operations.
Many governments and medical institutions issued guidelines to formalize the work from home (WFH) model for companies and individual practitioners. However, remote work has also introduced unprecedented challenges and a series of knock-on effects on economic growth for many years to come.
Apart from the core jobs, various support functions of an organization, including human resources, auditing, legal, marketing, and IT support, etc., are accustomed to working in an office environment where connectivity is rarely an issue. Out of these support functions, IT support is likely to face major challenges because of the overload of IT needs as more and more employees now work remotely.
Here, the technique called business process discovery (BPD) comes to the rescue. Process discovery along with AI and other disruptive technologies related to automation can help organizations with process visibility and accelerated automation deployment to resolve not only IT issues but also a broad range of inefficiencies across industries.
Automated Process Discovery and How Does It Work
Automated process discovery is a technique to detect business processes by recording user interactions with various systems, including enterprise solutions (such as ERP, CRM, BPM, and ECM), productivity applications, and terminal and virtual environments. While manual business process discovery and documentation are a barrier to automation scaling, automated process discovery exponentially increases the pace and the scale of automation.
Process discovery software records necessary data, including even mouse movements and clicks for identifying RPA opportunities and providing an ideal blueprint for automating critical business processes. With process discovery software, businesses can automate and speed up the entire automation process by following these steps:
- Capture: Automatically discover and document all process steps
- Map: Visualize the process workflow
- Identify: Detect automation opportunities
- Prioritize: Prioritize opportunities based on ROI
- Generate: Generate RPA bots automatically
- Deploy: Review, optimize, and deploy bots
Apart from providing a shorter path to RPA, organizations can also leverage process discovery software to realize benefits like cost savings, greater information security, enhanced scalability, and compliance maintenance.
Key Features that Support Remote Work and Detection of Process Inefficiencies
Here are some of the key features of process discovery that enable enterprises to detect and fix errors automatically, and remotely.
- Continuous Monitoring: Process discovery tools run silently on employees’ computers, collecting all critical process data without impairing employee performance or consuming their valuable time.
- Visual Process Mapping: Easy to understand process flow maps representing actions, applications, workflow, and variants.
- Actionable Process and Behavioral Insights: Gain real-time visibility into software application usage by analyzing all your automation data alongside detailed process maps, customized visualization, and pre-built dashboards.
- Compliance with Ideal Process: Conform to regulatory requirements by configuring process discovery tools to only record actions performed on a specific application.
Resolving IT Issues in Remote Set-Up with Automated Process Discovery
The IT-support team deals with a range of IT issues, from slight hiccups in VPN speed to problems in regulatory compliances, network and system access, application errors, and system crashes, to name a few. In the office setup, the IT support team may even keep an employee’s system in the lab for inspection and try to recreate error scenarios to identify the root cause. Carrying out such tasks becomes impossible because of remote working.
Process discovery tools can help in such scenarios. Process discovery software captures all the digital interactions made by employees at a granular level. This means it records each keystroke, mouse click, copy + paste, the value entered, screen viewed, button clicked, and other operations along with screenshots. After documenting the captured flow of transactions with detailed steps, it generates a visual representation of the process flow map.
The IT support team only needs to review this flow map for carrying out a quick root cause analysis. Based on RCA, they can detect the issue and provide a fix accordingly. This way IT functions can complete their IT tickets remotely and quickly. The only requirement is that employees need to have process discovery software running at their end.
This saves valuable time and effort of the employees, increasing overall productivity. They need not waste their time troubleshooting the issue on their own, sharing umpteen system logs, getting on a call, and continuously sharing their screen to try to resolve the issue.
Conclusion
This sudden shift in working environments should not hamper business operations. With AI-driven process discovery, you can gain deep insights into your processes and ensure maximum process visibility, conformance, and employee productivity. Besides, it accelerates the enterprise automation process by finding high-value automation opportunities and converting these opportunities into bot prototypes in no time.
