Sifting out the Manual Work

How to get past process prospecting and into process mining

"If you want to find gold, you’ve got to love the process of digging."? —Alan Menken

?Despite all the advancements in automation at my fingertips, I often still feel like I'm prospecting instead of properly mining a process. Sometimes the best way is a fusion of logical techniques and technical solutions.

Take the following problem:

We have a process with two sets of activities. One we can determine for certain whether or not it was manual. For the other set, it is unclear whether an activity was automated or manual. We know that there are some automated processes and some manual activities in that second set and want to be able to separate out the manual activities, or the gold in process mining.

Our solution was as follows:

We first used two anchor points in the process that we knew for certain were stamped with an automated/manual flag. We then split the process in two using Celonis filters and created a BPMN to view the process. We were able to see that there was a union of sets between them in that second set of opaque activities. We could then act as if those were also automated activities. As you can see in the example image, it is a fairly simple logical process and can be done very easily using the Celonis process filters.

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We've used this on clients that have had this problem with success. It is particularly helpful in limiting the noise from valid automated processes. By quickly condensing these activities in the Variant Explorer by using a Custom Dimension, you can quickly sketch out options and see if your logical work has had success.

We hope this was helpful as you continue to sift for gold nuggets in your process!

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