Top Task Mining Software to Compare in 2023

According to the Everest Group, task mining is one of the fastest growing markets in the intelligent automation space, and posts an 85% to 95% growth rate. But many enterprise leaders still wonder what task mining is and what it can do for their company.

To give you more information about what task mining can do for you, we’ve looked 8 top task mining tools you can compare in 2023.

What is task mining

Task mining software helps companies automatically analyze how work is done across various tasks performed by employees and teams. It typically works by collecting data such as keystrokes, clicks, screenshots or screen recordings from different user’s desktop computers or workstations.

The goal of task mining software is to improve operational efficiency - for example, through streamlining key processes, identifying ways to reduce handling time or automate key tasks.

Example of task mining software - Workfellow Process Intelligence

What is task mining used for?

In simple terms task mining is about analyzing and improving tasks within business processes.

Processes and subprocesses are made up of numerous tiny phases, but, despite living in the digital age, many employees still waste time on manual work. In fact, an average 20-person enterprise operations team spends 60 hours of repetitive reporting and analytics on Excel. Thankfully, task mining increases general transparency and identifies tasks that can be automated.

In most cases, task mining is not, as some people worry, a tool to monitor or spy on employees. The technology looks at employee activity to remove bottlenecks and eliminate subpar handovers. Businesses can combine task mining and process mining to comprehend end-to-end processes and analyze handoffs, resource usage, and more.

How task mining works

Task mining tools track user behaviors to learn how employees carry out their work. When every employee's computer has these programs installed, the software can gather information on clicks, scrolls, and other actions, along with screenshots and time stamps.

Records are assessed using business information like KPI metrics for businesses to monitor how employees carry out their duties and gauge performance. With this, managers can determine the causes of inefficient performance, see the most frequent errors and teach staff how to avoid them.

How task mining software works — An illustration how task mining software works

The benefits of task mining

With tasking mining, businesses can track KPIs for particular, frequently overlooked tasks. The technology enables companies to monitor job efficiency and make data-driven decisions about process optimization while assuring enhanced compliance by analyzing user interaction data. By implementing task mining, companies can achieve workflow optimization, which has several benefits such as:

Providing employees with clear guidance.
Aiding in preserving consistency when bringing on new personnel.
Decreasing mistakes
Saving time spent on employee training.
Enhancing communication, teamwork, and HR processes

What makes a good task mining tool?

According to Gartner, a task mining tool should support the following capabilities:

Data preparation -Explores, combines, cleans, and turns raw data into a curated dataset at scale.
Data visualization - A graphical representation of information that offers insights by highlighting patterns and trends.
Data security - Protects sensitive information with encryption, masking, erasure, resilience and end-user privacy.
OCR - Data is automatically extracted from printed or handwritten text from a scanned document or picture file using optical character recognition (OCR) technology. It transforms text into a machine-readable format so that it can be used for data-processing tasks like editing or searching. It is also helpful for deciphering UI-level interaction with objects.
Automated insights - provides teams with direction regarding the automatable nature of tasks and subprocesses. This provides significant recommendations regarding the difficulty of task execution, as well as specific simulations and visualizations that outline significant insights for decision-makers.
Computer vision - computer vision uses digital photos or movies to derive in-depth knowledge. From an engineering standpoint, it aims to comprehend and automate operations that the human visual system is capable of.

The above list describes some technical features. It's important to also remember that a good task mining tool is one that is easy to implement and does the job of providing task capture and insights effectively for your business use case. In this regard, there are many different solutions catering to the needs of large, medium and smaller organizations. Below we go through 8 of the more popular options.

Top task mining tools to follow in 2023

Workfellow Process Intelligence

A relatively new method for automated process analysis is called Workfellow Process Intelligence. In accordance with the set requirements of enterprises, it extracts business data objects from graphical user interfaces. In other words, it gathers pertinent business signals from connected devices of employees and automates a process without the use of traditional data mining and data integration techniques.

Work API analyzes processes across all IT systems and business applications more quickly and easily without the use of IT or integration resources. Another benefit is that it makes it possible to track work more broadly by using insights from tasks, processes, and systems to provide a 360-degree view of operational excellence.

The unique plug-and-play technology analysis work activities to help find improvement opportunities and automatically recommends how to achieve them. What’s more, Workfellow doesn’t collect any personal data, so employees are free of GDPR concerns.

With Workfellow, you can also:

Increase employee satisfaction and ensure efficient and joyful work by eliminating physical labor and boring tasks.

Make smart decisions with fact-based recommendations backed by real data.

Increase productivity by helping employees to focus on creative work

Enjoy continuous improvement with real-time automation

Improve customer experience by simplifying and easing their journey

UIPath Task Capture

To uncover potential areas for process improvement and candidates for automation, UiPath Task Mining employs a data-driven methodology to get a deeper understanding of the tasks that employees conduct on their desktops.

The technology spots variations of certain tasks and combines them to provide a comprehensive view, or use AI-powered analysis to mine the unexplored areas to find repeated tasks.

Some more benefits of UI Path Task Capture include:

Privacy: Task mining only records applications and domains that have already been approved.
Fully encrypted uploads and transfers.
Identifies and scraps pointless activities for heightened efficiency by improving tasks end to end.

Celonis Task Mining

Celonis Task Mining runs in the background of desktops to see numerous actions, such as clicks and keyboard shortcuts. Designed with privacy in mind, the technology is only activated when employees use a whitelisted application.

With Celonis, a raw event log of clicks, scrolls, and various other actions is generated by a desktop application using Windows API. Users have the option to log screenshots in png format. What’s more, analysts can view status messages and errors in the admin panel.

With Celonis, you get:

Confidentiality with the Execution Management System (EMS) Trust Center:
Encryption in transit between the desktop and the EMS . Role-based access in the EMS.
Client authentication: The client is limited to a data-only view and must access controls via API key.
User-friendly and capable of handling large projects.

Hundreds of users can manage projects with ease thanks to a unique user interface. The interface consists of several parts: a desktop application that sends data to the Data Integration and File Storage

ABBYY Timeline

ABBYY Timeline can be broken down into three steps: recording, analysis, and recommendations. The scalable and nonintrusive technology captures variations in how tasks are performed over a large period of time to enable large teams of desktop users to see variations in user interaction paths.

ABBYY Timeline also protects privacy with OCR technology that removes sensitive information. After gathering and analyzing information, the technology recommends tasks for automation based on length of time, repetition, and complexity. By doing this, ABBYY Timeline helps organizations scale high-value automation and build transformation plans.

With ABBYY’s task mining technology, users can identify:

Tasks worth automating
Possible tasks to automate
Automation’s effects on processes
Tasks that waste time
The best set of tasks necessary to complete work.

Microsoft Process Advisor

Task mining in Microsoft Process Advisor enables you to swiftly capture precise steps for any process in your organization to better understand where to streamline workflows.

You can carry out this activity alone or with the collaboration of coworkers.

A process map that depicts the check-in procedure is generated automatically by Process Advisor. You can observe which actions take the most time, how many different ways the check-in process is implemented, and how many different ways it is implemented.

With this technology, you can:

Prepare processes and recordings
Analyze processes
Visualize processes
Identify automation recommendations
Share processes

What’s more, you can Identify which apps teams spend the most time on and the best activities to optimize using application analytics and analytics dashboards. The tool also enables you to see automation recommendations that show which connectors to employ depending on your workflows and direct you to develop cloud flows.

IBM Task Mining

IBM Task Mining is an on-screen activity analysis tool for desktop computers. it keeps track of, examines, and produces insights about user interactions, and it also assists you in entering the data into IBM Process Mining.

In order to capture, gather, store, and process data, the IBM Task Mining architecture has four components: TM Web, TM Agent, TM Backend, and Persistency Layer. The architecture guarantees the 256 bit Key Encryption and Persistency Layer data security. In order to provide seamless interoperability between the two programs, it also translates and loads the data from IBM Task Mining into IBM Process Mining.

The key benefits of IBM task mining are:

Productivity: You can estimate how long it takes users to complete each event in a process with the aid of IBM Task Mining. It records the downtime or delays brought on by context changes or rework, which highlights process inefficiencies in manual tasks. The technology also offers cost estimates and comparisons of your existing process and the automated process.

Better understanding of working patterns: By locating deviations and inefficiencies, IBM Task Mining analyzes performance trends and identifies the most effective ways to accomplish tasks. It identifies the underlying reasons for inefficiency and takes steps to make the most effective patterns the best practices for the staff.

Automations: IBM Task Mining determines and simulates the working patterns that can be automated. The process simulation analyzes the performance and financial benefits of automation while merging business data and user interaction data.

StereoLOGIC

With StereoLOGIC, you have access to all the tools you need to examine and improve your business operations. You can quickly employ all analytical capabilities, including Operational Intelligence, Process Mining, and Task Mining, without expending any additional work in one automated modeling platform.

The technology precisely extracts and maps employee tasks without requiring desktop installation. Even if employees regularly stop these jobs as they go from one to the next, StereoLOGIC will still give precise documentation and analytics data for each task.

StereoLOGIC also offers:

Detailed, specific details on each task
Elimination of noise, including interruptions and diversions from employees, which often skew task mining
Identification of inefficiencies and activities that don't offer value
Deletion of confidential client and staff data

ActiveOps

ActiveOps is a helpful tool for the post-pandemic way of working. It brings order and insights into remote work by adding to established process and task mining technologies to enable system managers to look after and steer work in decentralized workplaces.

Active Ops is a methodology rather than technology. It’s centered around Active Operations Management (AOM) methodology to provide forecasting, planning, and optimization. With this in mind, ActiveOps is best utilized by companies who already recognize what processes they wish to improve.

The ActiveOps “collector” integrates with HR systems and provides insights into team performance to offer the following benefits:

Better communication between HR and performance management
Automation of skills and work management
Helps large organizations grasp the implications of remote working
Brings order into the new world of hybrid working

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How to pick a task mining solution in 2023?

Task mining is an actively developing area of enterprise software with more options available every year. If you're looking to compare and choose a task mining solution remember that many vendors will provide a Proof-of-Concept or willingly participate in an RFP for process intelligence software.

If you have not yet identified the requirements for your unique needs, remember also that many vendors will provide complimentary demonstrations of their tools through their websites.

You can schedule a demo with Workfellow Process Intelligence through a calendar picker here.

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