Process Discovery
Establishing a robust process discovery approach helps organizations to create a consistent and strong pipeline of process opportunities.
Process Discovery is the approach to objectively identify, analyze, qualify, prioritize and schedule business processes for automation. Such processes are recorded and tracked in an inventory, which forms the demand pipeline.
Process Discovery Framework
To generate potential opportunities to feed your pipeline, it is important to identify the areas in which to target, qualify the potential opportunities and prioritize when these will be delivered. There are three key stages of the Process Discovery Framework: Process Triage, Process Assessment and Process Analysis.
Getting these stages right, will maximise the pipeline of opportunity available to your business.
The main priority of the triage stage is to engage with the organization in order to identify potential opportunities for automation. This may be achieved through:
- Educating the organization on RPA and the ‘art of the possible’
- Identifying processes at a high level that are good potential candidates for automation
- A bottom-up approach via workshops, automation requests etc.
- A top-down approach via engaging senior leadership, department heat-maps etc.
Candidate processes with potential will then be moved forward for further assessment in the Process Assessment phase
Find out more about the Process Triage phase.
The main priority of the assessment stage is to confirm the suitability and the readiness of opportunities for automation. This may be achieved through:
- A lower level review of the candidate processes, often through workshops with Process SMEs
- Capturing process complexity, frequency and volumes
- Considering automation potential, ease of implementation, opportunity benefit and assessing the target application.
Candidate processes with potential will then be moved forward for further analysis in the Process Analysis phase.
Find out more about the Process Assessment phase.
The main priority of the analysis stage is to collate the information collected in the Triage and Assessment stages in order to prioritize where the opportunities will sit in the pipeline of work. This may be achieved through:
- Working with the Process SME to further analyze the process in greater depth in order to define the priority of the process for automation and ensure there are no potential blockers
- Produce a document to take to the Governance Board (if in place) for approval. This may be in the form of an:
- Initial Process Analysis report
- Impact Assessment
- Output from the Blue Prism Process Discovery Tool
- Change Record or another similar document
- Present the output of the process analysis to the Governance Board, or Head of RPA if no board exists, for final approval.
Find out more about the Process Analysis phase.
Questions to consider
- Does your process discovery approach follow a structured impact assessment process?
- Is there an inventory tool in place to enable you to maintain an auditable record of, and report on, your process activities?
- Are opportunities reviewed and aligned to strategic business drivers and impact of not making the change?
- How do you determine the automation potential across the organization or business area to form a pipeline?
- Are IT responsible for defining the System Change Control Policy?
- Are the business responsible for defining the method for initiating and managing change requests?
- Is the Head of RPA responsible for defining the Process Management Policy?
- Does the pipeline align timescales, communicate intentions to relevant parties and/or procedures for project initiation?
- Are proposed automations scheduled and planned by scoring and prioritisation?
- Does the Head of RPA manage the process for initiating and managing change requests to existing processes?
The Process Assessment Tool is a web-based solution that qualifies and scores processes in terms of automation-readiness and ease-of-implementation—with an estimate of cost savings and hours returned to the business—so you know which processes to automate in order to achieve the biggest value. Again and again.