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Challenge
The multinational computer technology company's finance department was struggling to hit its annual automation targets due to long lead times for RPA deployments. It took 129 days on average to complete a deployment, 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 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.” - Michael Harrison, Process Engineer, Finance RPA Team
Solution
Instead of manual mapping, the company automatically generated maps with Mimica Mapper. When the RPA team wanted to build a bot, rather than assigning a business analyst to spend time with the SME to host interviews and workshops, they simply deployed Mapper on the SME’s machine. Mapper sat on the employee computer for 1-2 weeks and observed the process, then used the click and keystroke data in the process to generate a detailed flow diagram.
Mapper helped the RPA team predict ROI for all opportunities. It highlighted the benefit case — how much time was spent in the process (Average Handle Time) 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.
The Mapper flow diagram was generated in 1 week, and contained all decision points, variants and exceptions in the process. 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’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 upfront, less time was spent troubleshooting errors during UAT and after launch.
Results
Over a 6 month period, Mimica reduced lead time for RPA deployments by 65% from 129 days on average to 45 days. A 65% reduction in lead time is equivalent to 3x more automation deployed annually with the same resources. The company’s RPA program was automating $18M of work annually, so the projected incremental value of Mimica across all RPA deployments was $36M.
“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 map is very useful for building automation.” - RPA Developer
“Overall I had 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 meeting but those were necessary.” – Process SME
“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
