The challenge: Optimizing legacy workflows

With a workforce spanning dozens of departments, leadership in the City of Amarillo recognized that many processes were rooted in legacy frameworks that had not kept pace with emerging technologies. These workflows had reliably supported operations for decades. But they often depended on manual coordination such as relying heavily on phone calls, email, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and paper copies.

As new software and digital tools were introduced over time, they were not always strategically integrated into existing workflows. This led to a need to reduce bottlenecks, improve alignment, and maximize the value of technology investments.

The City of Amarillo needed a way to map the current state of their processes accurately across the numerous systems being used. And beyond just mapping the processes, they needed a way to identify which ones presented the best opportunity for automation.

"We want to take a project, map it, automate it, and then rerecord it to see the tangible effect... almost like a case study for what we can achieve across the city." — Joy Stuart, Senior Innovation Officer, City of Amarillo

The solution: Data-driven process discovery

The City’s Innovation Team used Mimica to record real-time workflows, capturing every click to create a "process blueprint" of city operations.

The blueprint allows them to continously improve operations through:

• Automated documentation: Mimica generates Process Definition Documents (PDDs), detailed documents with step-by-step screenshots. These serve as the foundation for the city’s AI Solutions Architect to build custom Python-based automations.
• System optimization: The city prioritized mapping processes within Workday to identify tasks that can be streamlined directly in the ERP versus those requiring custom automation.
• High-impact targets: The city intentionally focused their efforts on departments with the highest ROI opportunities including  Finance (Accounts Payable/Receivable, Grants), HR, and Purchasing.

The impact: A tangible roadmap for growth

By moving from anecdotal observations to data-driven insights, the City of Amarillo is achieving:

• Standardization: Mimica reconciles different ways of performing the same task across users, establishing a single "ideal" process for the organization.
• Eliminating redundancy: The city uses Mimica to find duplicate work, often discovering that existing software features can replace manual Excel-based tasks.‍
• Measuring success: The team plans to rerecord processes post-automation to provide tangible data on hours saved for the City Manager’s office. This will provide tangible proof of the team's success.

In a municipal government, where resources are scrutinized, the ability to show a clear, quantified result for each project makes the next project easier to approve. For the City of Amarillo, Mimica is the mechanism by which the Innovation Team builds toward the future.