How Digital Twins Can Support Digital Transformation

It’s evident: digitisation is all around us. Whether we’re trying to contact a customer service agent or ordering food, digital technologies are behind an immense volume of day-to-day processes and transactions — many of which we don’t see ourselves.

Is it hard to imagine a time before this? Not really, if we think about it: long queues, constant errors, wrong information and frustratingly slow progress. Support from digital technologies has been the saving grace for many businesses and customers alike. It’s taken the repetitive, labour-intensive and mundane tasks away from humans and directed them to focus on more high-level, productive work. The bottom line is that time is spent better, which brings out a wealth of other benefits with it.

But how do organisations go about this mammoth task to identify, validate, and monitor processes that can be reimagined through digitisation?

It’s why most companies have a process-improvement team. They use process and task mining, also known as digital twins, to evaluate every task or transaction as it evolves, either through manual updates or – if they’re smart – by automation.

They analyse throughput time and processes for smoother operations. In situations where tiny margins count, this allows companies to improve processes, reduce costs, and improve product quality.

Intelligent automation makes quick work of business activities through its digital workforce. But do you know which processes should actually be automated?

How to make digital twins work for you

Process and task mining are the maestros of the digital landscape. Critical to your organisation, both analyse and improve real-time business processes but focus on different aspects and have distinct methodologies.

Process mining concentrates on the broader view of end-to-end business operations. It seeks to discover, monitor, and improve the entire sequence of activities and interactions within an organisation, including the way tasks are connected and how data flows through the processes.

Task mining focuses primarily on how individual tasks are performed by users, including the specific steps they take and the applications they use, to capture their interactions with software and systems. By extracting these valuable data insights, businesses can refine them to improve specific processes and business productivity.

Although digital twins are virtual models working happily side by side comparing and testing different strategies, they are critical to revolutionising how your business operates. The real power occurs when they work in harmony to integrate plans, innovations, and technologies, without risk.

To understand the role of digital twins in a successful automation strategy, let’s take a closer look at the part played by process mining in helping to assess the eligibility of new processes for automation and provide an end-to-end, realistic view of combined process performance.

Holistic automated process view benefits 

With the advancement of machine learning and intelligent automation, digital twins are now a staple in driving innovation and improving performance across most sectors, not least in the financial, healthcare, insurance, supply chain and telecom areas.

Process mining is hugely beneficial for capturing a picture of how processes are performing, with process visualisations providing an accurate workflow through each of the process stages, identifying any delays or bottlenecks along the way. Process mining also makes compliance easier by using audit trails to create a model of processes. They can then be monitored in real time and alert organisations immediately to any issues. 

Without these process mining techniques, business process improvement goals are based on guesswork or extremely complex and time-consuming. To properly analyse process performance, you’d have to perform manual data reviews and interviews with users. This isn’t just a slow process, but one with a high margin of error.

Process mining generates granular process maps, flowcharts, and performance metrics for entire business operations. In a rapidly evolving landscape, this helps you stay on top of your automation and identify opportunities to improve with minimal effort.

A case in point is a Fortune 100 financial services firm, which needed to monitor investor compliance onboarding. Relying on 16 full-time employees, only 15% of it could be monitored overall, which had a huge impact on the firm. However, process mining helped monitor 100% of transactions, saving the firm $2 million annually.

Another example of the benefits of digital twins and process mining is in telecommunications - or any other sector where companies manage massive physical and digital footprints across the globe. With so much business activity, simple tasks, such as resolving billing disputes and processing payments are ripe inefficiencies and error. Business analysis through process mining is ideal for preventing issues before they arise or become more challenging to tackle.

The result in both examples is a holistic 360-degree view of business processes, asset condition, and historical data. Process mining can also monitor people, processes and tasks within a business, instantly highlighting areas for optimisation so automations can then be developed to integrate anything from artificial intelligence to software analytics.

SS&C Blue Prism’s Process Intelligence powered by ABBYY Timeline offers tight integration between process mining, task mining and intelligent automation. It also combines business process management (BPM) capabilities to facilitate decision-making and delivers a unified workforce with the ability to monitor, respond and even predict future outcomes. These comprehensive and crucial capabilities are all integrated and delivered by digital workers.

Conclusion

Inefficient tasks have the potential to slow the progress of your business, hindering its growth and efficiency if they go unseen. Whether it’s data entry, document approvals or regulatory compliance, each process presents room for error, oversight, and non-compliance to sneak in.

Fortunately, digital twins and digital workers play a crucial role in process improvement and optimisation to help alleviate these challenges and spot automation opportunities, paving the way for enhanced productivity and optimized processes to ultimately accelerate and scale the success of your business.