Why did I move from RPA to the Process Mining software industry?

It has now been almost 6 years since I have tried cracking the Intelligent Automation industry working for organisations of all shapes, sizes, and focuses. The journey took me through all of the RPA (Robotic Process Automation) market maturity phases from its introduction to its growth stage (some of my peers would argue that the RPA market is now entering its Maturity stage). Its market size and addressable market grew considerably as software and consulting companies bullishly advocated the large automation potential; large to mid-size corporations could benefit from. Everyone has overestimated the capability to drive transformational changes at scale through automation and underestimating the customers' organizational complexity.

During its introduction phase, my team spent most of its time educating the market place about software automation, our automation platform capabilities and potential savings our prospects could expect generating. We ran numerous free of charge detailed process discovery engagements that incorporated business user interviews, time & motion analysis, As-IS/To-Be processes documentation as well as business case creation and believed this would ease, speed up the overall sales cycle. Additionally, we were promoting our plug&play End2End automated processes library as the most relevant solution. We made it easy for our prospects to commit. BUT IT DID NOT WORK.

Organisations and decision-makers became very skeptical about our business cases' results and recommendations and often our consulting partners' inputs. It felt too good to be true and too simple. In a nutshell, we (software provider) were recommending our prospects to perform a leap of faith moving away from their complex way to operate and replacing it with our process libraries. The slide below easily illustrates the misalignment between the customer's complex As-Is process (Process in the right), their actual perception of it (Process in the middle) and our To-Be process recommendation (Process in the left end side). Moving from right to left would have definitely require much more effort than just implementing an E2E automated process.

Illustration 1.1- Process map from Minit Process Analyst user interface

Don't get me wrong, RPA solutions are becoming more mature and complex through the addition of new capabilities to grow their automation coverage such as workflow, recorders, Machine learning, OCR integration(Optical Character Recognition), Analytics, and even process mining.

It became clear to me that automating tasks without acquiring the full understanding of the process in its entirety was not doing anyone any good. Process Mining solutions are game-changers in the BPI (Business Process Improvement) space as they enable Process Owners, Heads of GBS/Shared Service Centres, Process improvement, RPA COE teams and many other to leverage a factual and interactive platform to identify processes inefficiencies, perform root cause analysis, Stress test/simulate new scenarios (E.g, New demands, realignment of manual/digital labor, new process schema..). In this age of unpredictable economic fluctuation, #ProcessMining is the must needed solution to help any organisation to proactively align its organisational operation as explained in one of the latest Forbes article.

I will share more insights from my Process Mining experience in the next coming weeks and how we at @minit Process Mining are helping our customers with digital transformation and business process improvement journey. Stay tuned.