Automating automation with RPA and process mining—available for Power Automate
Efficiency is key for sustained success across organizations and industries, especially as everyone is looking for new ways of working to be more adaptable and resilient to change. It is no surprise, then, that robotic process automation (RPA) is gaining momentum to free up employees’ time to focus on higher–value work. With this traction comes a growing demand for deeper insight into opportunities to automate daily activities across organizations and departments, while prioritizing the highest-value tasks best fit for automation.
Today we have two announcements that further democratize automation in Microsoft Power Automate and empower everyone to optimize how they work by automating automation:
- Microsoft Power Automate Desktop is now generally available. With the general availability, we are bringing together the capabilities that we announced at Microsoft Ignite in preview and we are excited to introduce additional capabilities to provide a robust RPA experience that is accessible for everyone.
- Process advisor, now available in preview, introduces process mining to Power Automate. It provides a deeper understanding of how people work and helps you understand which time-consuming processes are best suited for automation.
Breaking down barriers to knowing what and when to automate
Now generally available, Power Automate Desktop extends the automation capabilities in Power Automate to on-premises processes and tasks, enabling anyone in the organization to automate desktop or web-based applications. Fueled by low-code RPA, Power Automate Desktop unifies automation between API-based automation with cloud flows and UI-based automation with desktop flows.
In conjunction with these new capabilities, we are releasing several enhancements in Power Automate to help you further scale RPA and the management of your automation capabilities. Read more about these enhancements, including lifecycle management for RPA, real-time run and queue monitoring, out-of-the-box usage and error analytics reports, and role-based sharing experience for automations.
RPA in Power Automate solves one part of the automation challenge. To effectively drive efficiency across an organization and more impact, organizations need to identify workflow bottlenecks that slow the business down. Process advisor brings this all together.
Better understanding how you work with process advisor—now in preview
Not all processes are equal when it comes to the value of automating them. The processes that demand the most manual time and resources typically drive priority. Process advisor breaks down barriers that might make it difficult for an organization to identify where they might benefit the most from automation.
Process advisor helps you find opportunities to automate old ways of working with easy–to–use process maps and analytics that provide insights into the areas that need automating across your organization. It provides a guided experience to visualize variations in your workflows and identify opportunities for optimization by leveraging the following capabilities:
- Run simple process recorders: The process recorder quickly captures the detailed steps for each process—working solo or by inviting colleagues to contribute and collaborate.
- Create rich process maps: Better understand how you work with a visual process map that provides an end-to-end visualization of the variations in how processes are run across multiple users. These insights make it easy to identify inefficiencies and areas for potential automation.
- Get in-depth analytics: Teams can leverage out-of-the-box analytics to better understand variations across each process map and learn from these metrics to improve how they work. Key insights include how many people recorded the task, the average time it takes to complete a task, how many different paths your users took, and more.
Let’s look at a real-world example of how process advisor and Power Automate Desktop can work together to identify and automate a range of processes at PharmScript.
Power Automate helps PharmScript focus on patients, not processes
PharmScript, a leading pharmacy provider to long-term care and post-acute care facilities, serves more than 750 facilities and 100,000 residents across the U.S. Founded in 2009 with the goal of providing a seamless pharmacy experience, PharmScript is committed to helping providers deliver patient-centered care with high-quality service, accuracy, timeliness, and cost containment. Across the healthcare facilities PharmScript serves, providers are asked to do more, for less—and do it better.
As if that’s not enough, providers, and PharmScript alike, face increased regulatory and compliance demands, and more complex patient populations. By using advanced technology solutions, like Power Automate Desktop and the process advisor preview release, PharmScript is enabling those closest to the problem to automate time and resource-consuming tasks.
In the past, PharmScript’s billing department devoted more than 135 team hours each month to manually process thousands of medication bills across more than 140 facility locations. By tapping into the RPA capabilities in Power Automate, PharmScript fully automated the end-to-end process, from report generation, data validation, and processing—saving more than 90 hours per month that can be devoted to higher-value work.
To further optimize its automated processes, PharmScript is using the preview version of process advisor to visually map and understand the end-of-month lifecycle of order billing process, including how long it takes and all the steps in the process and its variations. By discovering bottlenecks, they can better understand how best to optimize the billing process, as well as use process advisor to capture and analyze more processes throughout the organization.
“As a rapidly growing company, by using Power Automate Desktop, among other automation strategies, we’re able to empower employees with no engineering or technical background to accelerate their digital transformation knowledge. Through the ability of automation PharmScript has been able to improve work efficiency, strengthen our accuracy, and enhance our compliance. The future is automation and we’re excited to see what new opportunities are presented as a result of products like Power Automate Desktop.” –Yanzhen Li, Director of Continuous Improvement
Get started with process advisor and Power Automate Desktop
Process advisor and Power Automate Desktop, along with a complete set of RPA capabilities in Power Automate, offer a cost-effective intelligent automation solution. By bringing together these capabilities into one platform it is helping everyone across an organization to collectively focus on work that makes a difference for your bottom line.
Try the preview of process advisor today to start identifying high-value processes to automate across your organization, and explore how Power Automate Desktop—now generally available—extends automation capabilities in Power Automate to on-premises processes and tasks.
Watch the video, “Optimize efficiency with process mining in Microsoft Power Automate.”
Additional resources
- Learn more about the feature updates in our deep dive blog post.
- See how to get started with process advisor in our documentation page.
- See how to get started with Power Automate Desktop on our documentation page.
