Workforce productivity is a hot topic for enterprises, so much so that a recent McKinsey on Insurance podcast noted that productivity “has become the number one or number two topic on a CEO’s desk.” At some organizations, this might be measured by revenue per employee or utilization of time spent on revenue driving work. Another way to measure productivity is in time spent on value-added activities — anything an internal or external customer is willing to pay for — compared to non-value-added activities.
Without a complete understanding of how work is done across the organization, it’s impossible to get a true measure of productivity — or know how to improve it. That’s where Mimica’s task mining and process intelligence solution comes in — helping enterprises improve productivity and drive revenue by:
- Benchmarking as-is processes to set improvement targets
- Making recommendations to optimize value-added activities
- Helping to reclaim hours spent on non-value-added activities
- Improving related processes for additional savings
- Measuring the impact of implemented improvements
Our productivity improvement success stories span Fortune 500 industries, including claims handling at a global insurer, order processing at an industrial machinery conglomerate, and payroll ticketing at a motor vehicle and parts manufacturer. Let’s dive into Mimica’s approach to improving enterprise productivity.
Get a complete understanding of how work is done across the organization
We say that enterprise transformation begins at the desktop level, by understanding the true scope of work that your subject matter experts (SMEs) undertake. Mimica Miner does this by capturing every click, keystroke, and action across all applications on the SME desktop. Within one week, Mimica automatically identifies, names, and categorizes the tasks that make up your team’s work, showing you how much time is spent on each task, and in which systems your team spends the most time. Using these insights, you can measure current productivity — by the amount of time spent on value-added tasks that make you money versus non-value-added tasks that don’t — and set improvement targets.
We often hear from employees involved in these projects that they didn’t realize how much time is taken up by repetitive tasks or processes that are far from optimal. In one case, Mimica found that an HR subject matter expert at a multinational telecom company had spent one hour each day for the last 14 years completing the same manual task.
In other cases, the employee may realize how much non-value-added work is impacting their productivity but proving it can be a pain point that Mimica can solve for. "Mimica was invaluable, pointing us to time savings. You’re not just listening to people saying this is a pain point,” said Deanna Pratt, transformation leader at Goodyear, “now we have actual numbers around how many thousands of hours a process costs per year."
Measure and optimize productivity
Unlike assumption-based process plans or models, Mimica works with visibility into all decision points, business rules, exceptions, and variants of the work being performed — and has the ability to parse data that process mining can't, such as handwritten notes on an invoice, or data contained within an Excel spreadsheet. As a result, Mimica can determine the root cause of poor-performing processes and make recommendations for improvement — something other task mining and process intelligence solutions can’t do.
And, thanks to data-driven process intelligence metrics like employee time spent, automatability, and ease-of-automation, Mimica surfaces the highest-ROI transformation and automation opportunities. Here are three ways that these improvements tie back to an increase in productivity:
- Optimization of value-added work processes — improve efficiency on the tasks that matter most to the organization’s bottom line, and standardize these processes across individual SMEs, teams, business units, and regions.
- Reduce time spent on non-value-added tasks — automation, system optimization, and elimination of unnecessary steps can help reclaim inefficient time spent on these tasks, freeing up more available time for value-added work.
- Identify other crucial process improvements — achieve massive time savings by retraining the team to match the most productive member, refactoring system settings, or adopting technology like IDP/RPA/GenAI.
In the case of a recent finance transformation project that the Global Business Services team at Merck ran using Mimica, they quickly identified a handful of automation opportunities that would save thousands of hours, and found additional savings on seasonal, value-added work that could be redistributed. Mimica also recommended an opportunity to implement GenAI that would reduce inefficient time spent by SMEs on report preparation and input solicitation, while also standardizing the resulting commentary into one voice. The end result? Optimized processes, more time spent on value-added activities, higher revenue per employee — increased productivity.
