What is a Process Advisor?
Process Advisor is a process mining tool in Power Automate that provides you a deep understanding of which processes are best suitable for automation. During the process, it records mouse clicks and keyboard keystrokes. The recordings of repetitive tasks are uploaded and analyzed by Process Advisor which makes recommendations on how Power Automate can streamline the workflow.
Process Mining and Task Mining
The goal of process mining and task mining is the same; to improve process efficiency. While process mining provides insights into enterprise-level processes, task mining that operates at the desktop level discovers and analyzes the tasks performed by users
Prerequisites
- Microsoft Dataverse should be enabled in Microsoft 365 along with the Microsoft Power Platform environment
- If you want to set up dataflows for process mining, you should be an Environment Maker in the security role of the Power Platform Admin Center
- And, Power Automate desktop for task mining. It is available for download from the process advisor
How to Sign up and Sign in for Microsoft Power Automate?
Prior to creating a cloud flow, register using any email address. You’ll need to spend some time registering if you’ve never used a Microsoft online product with that address.
- You must register if you haven’t used any previous online Microsoft products
- In flow.microsoft.com, select Try free in the upper-right corner
- Enter your email address
- Select the right arrow
Difference between Process Mining and Task Mining
Process Mining |
Task Mining |
|---|---|
| Process mining is better suited for identifying inefficiencies in enterprise-wide processes | To find out tasks that are running on the desktop, task mining is more appropriate |
| End-to-end process and sub-process | Task mining work with user interface logs |
| Process-oriented | User-oriented |
| In this, we can use techniques like data mining algorithms, process modeling, etc. |
Here, you can look into some working processes of Process Mining and Task Mining.
Working with Process Mining
- Process Mining is a series of events comprised of process steps with a distinct beginning and ending activity. Those process steps are individual actions or events in the process
- Log in to the Microsoft power automate page through https://flow.microsoft.com/
- Then click ‘Process advisor’ and start a new process by creating a new process as shown below
- Provide process name, description(optional), and select Data(preview) to create a process
- Select the data source as per the requirement. Here we are choosing ‘Excel’
- Connect data source along with credentials of 365 account
- And choose the data sheet from excel that you want to access and click ‘Next’
- Map entities : Along with mapping, we can choose and remove columns of our choice
- Map the columns which you need to show in Analytics(activity name, case id, start timestamp). And click ‘save and analyze’
- Analytics will be generated automatically as shown in the below image
Working with Task Mining
- Task Mining is the technology that allows businesses to capture user data and use that data to analyze how employees are getting their work done, and how their performance can be improved
- Log in to the Microsoft power automate page through https://flow.microsoft.com/
- Then click ‘Process advisor’ and start a new process by creating a new process as shown below
- Provide process name, description(optional), and select Recordings to create the process
- Pop-up will have appeared as shown below. And click ‘Add a recording’
- Then power automates desktop(PAD) App (which needs to be installed on the desktop) will be opened for recording purposes. And click on the record
- It will be showing each and every step of the activity as shown in fig.
- Finally, click ‘finish’ to save those recordings
- Then recording activities are shown in processes. To generate analytics, click ‘Save and Analyze’
And, also for Task Mining, we have some analysis like Visualizations, Time Analysis, and Filters. Let’s look into it how it would be!
Visualizations
Through visualizations, we can view data/recordings variants, cases, and activities along with filters
Time Analysis
We can also view time analysis of cases, activities, and variants along with filters
Filters
- Activity filter – Filters for all instances in which the specified activity is present
- Unit filter – Filters for a specific time unit to make the process easier to understand
- Start date filter – Filters for the time range in which recording began and ended
- Optional filters – You’ll have more filters to slice and dice the data if you imported Optional Columns during the data upload process. Optional filters for Location, Role and Resource are shown in the previous screenshot
It is easy to explore the potential applications of Process Advisor’s automation and increase productivity. More than simply knowing how long it takes to fully automate a business process, it is even more crucial to understand what you need to automate. Automating an inefficient business process can only accelerate the mess’s growth! We can speed up this procedure by utilizing a process advisor and the recording capabilities offered by Power Automate Desktop.
