Improve Finance Process Efficiency, Accuracy, and Speed with Task Mining

Your enterprise resource planning (ERP) software may connect and manage your critical finance processes — accounts payable and receivable, order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, record-to-report, and more — but much of the work done to complete those processes happens outside of that system. It’s the work done in spreadsheets, emails, notes, and the time spent switching between apps that adds additional layers of time and complexity. When today’s finance, automation, and digital transformation executives talk about finance transformation, they’re talking about driving business impact by enhanced efficiency, speed, and accuracy of existing processes, across all applications, using automation and GenAI technologies.

OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar recently joined McKinsey for a podcast on how to transform into an AI-powered finance function and noted that “there’s still so much in the finance department that is the look back, not the look forward. In five years, I want to be able to look at my team and see that everyone is in that mode of forward-thinking and insight-driven work, and that a lot of the work we do today becomes rote work that GenAI does for us.” AI-powered task mining, combined with process intelligence, is one such technology driving today’s finance transformations.

How task mining and process intelligence enable finance transformation

Enterprise finance processes are complex and disconnected — spread across systems, tools, applications, departments, teams, and individuals. Before you can improve these processes via intelligent automation, you have to know how the work actually gets done, then understand where improvements can be made, and finally, use these insights to deploy the automation. That’s where Mimica’s task mining and process intelligence come in.

Task mining records the interactions between a user and their desktop — all of the clicks, keystrokes, and tasks performed across all of their applications — highlighting inefficiencies and identifying opportunities to streamline, standardize, or automate key processes. This differs from process mining, which only follows the path of a transaction throughout a process within enterprise-level systems, but cannot follow work undertaken by an individual outside of these systems. In short, process mining shows you what is happening at the system level, and task mining shows you why work is happening in a certain way across individuals, teams, and systems.

Process intelligence is data that has been systematically collected to analyze individual steps within a business process or operational workflow. Mimica’s process intelligence delivers transparency on end-to-end processes, so that you can see how people are spending time and the specific actions they’re taking across all the steps and systems to accomplish their jobs. Mimica then identifies automation opportunities and helps eliminate operational bottlenecks to improve overall efficiency. 

Three reasons why Merck chose Mimica to lead their finance transformation 

Merck’s Global Business Services team mandate is to enable finance and procurement operations, by making them more efficient, drive savings, and reduce manual activities. After piloting several task mining vendors, only Mimica could offer the level of granularity, scale, and speed they needed. As Steve Carpenter, Executive Director of GBS Digital Services at Merck, noted in a recent webinar, “We're driving our finance transformation via process mining and task mining. Mimica is part of that remit because we believe that there are processes out there that aren't 100% system-based, and we need to have visibility into what's actually happening on the desktop.”

Starting with the R2R (Record to Report) process, and in just two weeks, Mimica:

1. Accurately measured and mapped as-is processes — Mimica's AI task miner mapped 200+ tasks, showing Merck how the work was being done, where to eliminate inefficiencies, and gave them the ability to set productivity benchmarks.

2. Improved the processes — Mimica recommended high-ROI process improvements for an immediate time savings of 10,000+ hours, helping to streamline internal and customer-facing processes to provide seamless, timely support and improve customer satisfaction.

3. Found immediate cost savings — Mimica's process intelligence also enabled the Merck GBS team to identify half a million dollars in cost-savings through streamlined processes and automation using GenAI.

As Ivonne Mora, R2R Process Director, highlighted, "We have worked for years in these processes, and by reviewing the maps and having these sessions, within an hour we discovered valid questions and differences that we never considered before."

To get your organization on the road to similar success, request a demo today.