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The finance department at this multinational computer technology company faced long lead times for robotic process automation (RPA) deployments. These delays prevented the team from hitting their annual automation targets and corporate cost-cutting goals. Completing a deployment took 129 days on average, including 78 days in the planning phase — identifying an opportunity and generating the documentation — and 51 days in the execution phase — building the bot, deploying it in production, and iteratively improving it until it handled all cases.
“Documenting processes is a monotonous, time-consuming task, and not all process knowledge is easily recalled by process subject matter experts (SMEs). This leads to incomplete process documentation and long lead times. Manual process mapping methods fall short and often fail to identify all process variants. This leads to issues in developing and deploying RPA bots.” - Process Engineer, Finance RPA Team
In order to speed up the entire RPA process, the company needed a better understanding of the work being done across the business and a way to save precious weeks and months on process discovery and documentation. That’s when they found Mimica.
Mimica Mapper automatically maps as-is processes
Before Mimica, the company would assign a business analyst (BA) to host SME interviews and workshops. It was up to the BA to then manually map the work being done, identify opportunities, and generate the documentation.
Mimica Mapper was deployed on the SME’s machine, capturing all clicks, keystrokes, and actions on the desktop. The Mapper flow diagram was generated in one week, and contained all decision points, variants, and exceptions in the process.
“Overall, I had a very positive experience with Mimica. It was documenting all my work while I was performing it. It was a huge advantage. Basically, there was no extra time spent on preparing the detailed guidelines for RPA automation if I don’t count a few SME meetings, but those were necessary.” – Process SME
Mapper highlighted the benefit case — how much time was spent on the average handle time (AHT) process and what percentage of the process was automatable — and the cost case — how easy the process was to automate with the company’s readily available automation technologies. This helped the RPA team rank all opportunities by ROI and focus on the best ones.
Mimica also highlighted un-automatable and partially automatable steps, for example steps with unstructured data. This allowed BAs and developers to immediately modify the Mimica map to create the to-be version, accounting for the problem areas and removing variants they wouldn’t attempt to automate.
“Mimica is a good tool for process map design. It is very efficient and accurate with workflow and it saves a lot of time in the development phase. This saved about 20-25% of the time analyzing the scenarios. It simplified decision-making and logic-building. Overall, Mimica process mapping is very useful for building automation.” - RPA Developer
Mimica’s approach took the burden off of business process SMEs and process analysts when documenting a process. It allowed for accurate identification of opportunities and prioritization. And by identifying variants up front, less time was spent troubleshooting errors during user acceptance testing (UAT) and after launch.
Mimica adds $36 million in incremental value to RPA
Over a six-month period, Mimica reduced lead time for RPA deployments from 129 days on average to 45 days. Not only was this a 65% reduction in lead time, it was equivalent to three times more automation deployed annually with the same resources. With the company’s RPA program automating $18 million of work annually, the projected incremental value of Mimica across all RPA deployments was $36 million.
“Mimica delivers on its promise to quickly and accurately generate detailed process documentation. Requirements gathering for RPA can and should be automated, and Mimica is the clear leader in this space.” – Process Engineer
