On the Pareto Principle in Process Mining, Task Mining, and Robotic Process Automation

Wil M. P. van der Aalst

2020

Abstract

Process mining is able to reveal how people and organizations really function. Often reality is very different and less structured than expected. Process discovery exposes the variability of real-life processes. Conformance checking is able to pinpoint and diagnose compliance problems. Task mining exploits user-interaction data to enrich traditional event data. All these different forms of process mining can and should support Robotic Process Automation (RPA) initiatives. Process mining can be used to decide what to automate and to monitor the cooperation between software robots, people, and traditional information systems. In the process of deciding what to automate, the Pareto principle plays an important role. Often 80% of the behavior in the event data is described by 20% of the trace variants or activities. An organization can use such insights to “pick its automation battles”, e.g., analyzing the economic and practical feasibility of RPA opportunities before implementation. This paper discusses how to leverage the Pareto principle in RPA and other process automation initiatives.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

van der Aalst W. (2020). On the Pareto Principle in Process Mining, Task Mining, and Robotic Process Automation.In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications - Volume 1: DATA, ISBN 978-989-758-440-4, pages 5-12. DOI: 10.5220/0009979200050012

in Bibtex Style

@conference{data20,
author={Wil van der Aalst},
title={On the Pareto Principle in Process Mining, Task Mining, and Robotic Process Automation},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications - Volume 1: DATA,},
year={2020},
pages={5-12},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0009979200050012},
isbn={978-989-758-440-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications - Volume 1: DATA,
TI - On the Pareto Principle in Process Mining, Task Mining, and Robotic Process Automation
SN - 978-989-758-440-4
AU - van der Aalst W.
PY - 2020
SP - 5
EP - 12
DO - 10.5220/0009979200050012