The team in charge of automation at this large multinational telecommunications company was struggling to discover, qualify, and document new automation opportunities. Their manual approach — using citizen developers across the company to find opportunities and deploy automations — was successful in the early years, but as their robotic process automation (RPA) program matured, significant limitations surfaced, including the inability to scale.
For example, human resources (HR) had a lot of work believed to be automatable, but the team didn’t have access to a business analyst (BA) who could analyze the processes and prove out ROI for a business case. The work remained unautomated for years as people struggled to find time outside their day jobs to invest in something that they weren’t sure would create value. That’s when they learned about Mimica.
Mimica delivers a roadmap to transformation
The team utilized Mimica to discover and map how work was done by subject matter experts (SMEs) across the organization. When they believed someone was doing automatable work, a Mimica recorder was installed on the desktop to capture all of the clicks and keystrokes involved in completing that work. Miner categorized all the tasks into processes and ranked them by time savings, automatability, and ease of automation, giving managers visibility into what aspects of the SMEs work were the best candidates for RPA.
Immediate value was created by identifying the available automation opportunities, but the team went a step further, using Mapper to give clear insights into which steps in the process were problem areas for RPA. In one instance, Mimica correctly identified that data read from an invoice was unstructured (different in every invoice) and needed to be classified by the SME. This allowed developers to plan the to-be version of the process in order to prepare for automation.
“Mimica is a gift. In one week, it outputted metrics that told us exactly how much time was spent in the process and what percentage of it was automatable. The data told us what we believed but couldn’t prove — that the process was indeed highly automatable — and allowed us to quickly make a business case for investing in the RPA development. The map contained all the steps, variants, and exceptions in the process, which significantly sped up development. Without it, we would not have automated a number of daily HR processes.” - Process Engineer, HR RPA Team
Mimica fully automated the discovery and documentation of automatable processes. By mining the employees' work, Mimica was able to identify opportunities for automation without pulling SMEs away from their jobs. And, by capturing exceptions and identifying variants upfront, less time was spent troubleshooting errors during user acceptance testing (UAT) and after launch.
Mimica adds $41 million in incremental value to RPA
Before Mimica, the company was building 340 bots per year, about 50% of its annual target of 700 bots. With Mimica they dramatically exceeded this target, increasing the value of their RPA program by 400% over a two-year period, translating to an incremental value of $41 million.
Mimica unlocked opportunities for the HR group that would not have been automated otherwise, discovering automatable processes and generating business cases for them automatically. One task, which an SME had been doing for one hour a day for 14 years, was identified for automation. Without Mimica they may have continued to do that manual process through the rest of their tenure at the company!
The company is now taking advantage of the opportunity to accelerate automation throughout the entire organization. Thanks to Mimica’s process maps, the deployment of RPA is dramatically accelerated and developers are automating more processes concurrently. Mimica miner will deploy on tens of thousands of machines, to do a broad-scale sweep across the enterprise for additional automatable opportunities.
