From the course: Process Mining for Robotic Process Automation

Defining process mining - UiPath Tutorial

From the course: Process Mining for Robotic Process Automation

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Defining process mining

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- Before we get technical, let's first clarify what we mean by process mining. In a broad sense, process mining describes the set of technologies that uses data to help businesses better understand their processes. Because data is the key here, it's expected that the processes being analyzed are completely or mostly digitized, meaning the data is in computers and not stored in someone's brain or captured on paper documents or written on Post-it Notes spread across your desk. As for the name process mining, it's very possible that you'll hear other terms for this industry like process intelligence, but process mining is still the most popular term so we'll use that for this course. There's also a more technical definition. Within the process mining ecosystem, there is a distinction between tools that are strictly called process mining tools and ones called process discovery tools. The difference lies in how the software collects and organizes process data. Process mining tools extract transactional workflow data from applications, also known as event logs. Think of actions in a ticketing system such as case created, case updated and case approved. Each step taken is recorded as an event in a log, hence event logs. And as a result of how it collects information, process mining is related to event log capture. Process discovery tools on the other hand, observe user actions directly as they complete their tasks rather than extracting data from event logs. So we say they're related to task capture. We'll explore these two approaches in more detail in the later sections, appropriately titled "What Is Event Log Capture?" and "What Is Task Capture?" Outside of this technical discussion, the term process mining in this course will generally mean the technologies including both process mining and discovery tools. What's more, we're seeing an industry trend of consolidation of both approaches since they've both proven useful in different contexts. The largest process mining vendors increasingly offer both tools in their process mining suites. In summary, the favorite term for the industry as a whole has always been process mining, but don't be surprised if you hear other terms as well. The key is in the value they create for an organization.

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