Process Mining and Automation

Serco is responsible for the back office processes in the marketplace systems of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) program in the United States. In this month’s Process Mining Café, we talked with Erik Scroggs and Lloyd Dugan , who have applied process mining for various use cases.

In the café, they shared three examples.

Use case No. 1: Robot efficiency

At Serco, humans and robots work together. The robotic workers take on simple tasks and hand them over to the humans for more complex activities. Erik analyzed the flow of work between robots and humans and discovered unexpected opportunities for improving their co-working setup.

Use case No. 2: Automation opportunities

How can you identify which parts of the process can be automated? Process mining helps to identify automation opportunities by providing the numbers for calculating the business case. If you have multiple ideas, these numbers will help you to validate where you get the most out of automating next.

Use case No. 3: Training paths

As a third example, Erik showed how they analyzed their training flows. Brand-new workers start with baseline training and, over time, receive more and more training badges that make them eligible to work new product lines. Based on the discovered training paths, they can now classify their production workers and make projections for the future.

Finally, we also talked about the skepticism and bad reputation that automation sometimes has. It is a reality that if robots take over simple tasks, only the knowledge work remains. So, automation is driving existing workers more into a career path. We discussed if this is a good or a bad thing.

You can now watch the recording here if you missed the live broadcast or want to re-watch the café. A big thanks to Erik and Lloyd and all of you for joining us!

Links

Here are the links that we mentioned during the session:

• Erik gave a talk at this year’s Process Mining Camp. Sign up at the camp mailing list to be notified as soon the video recording of his presentation becomes available.
• Case study at a housing association, where process mining discovered automation opportunities.
• Privacy, Security, and Ethics guide for process mining.

Contact us anytime at [email protected] if you have questions or suggestions for the café.

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