UiPath vs. Celonis vs. Kyp.ai: Get to Know the Leading Task Mining Tools

Let’s return to the groovy era and imagine ourselves in a typical office in the 1970s. Your employees probably punch a clock in the morning and out when they’re done. Then, you do multiple daily rounds, closely supervising their work. Each week, you sit down to review their work logs and notes detailing all activities performed and tasks completed.

These methods, while trust-based, made it challenging to obtain reliable data on employee activities. They were also heavily manual, involving a lot of effort on the employee’s and employer’s side while leaving plenty of room for error and omission.

Fortunately, today, task mining makes it possible to achieve 99% accuracy in tracking teamwork efficiently. The only question remains, “Which task-mining solution should I go for?”

In our two-article series, we’ll help you make the optimal choice by reviewing and comparing task mining tools like UiPath, Celonis, and Kyp.ai, and learning how to use them to support your teams better. Let’s begin by covering the basics of task mining and briefly looking at some leading solutions.

Task mining is a technology-driven approach that traces and analyzes user interaction data to optimize task efficiency. These user interactions include employees’ activities on their computers, mobile devices, and software applications to accomplish assigned jobs, such as keystrokes, mouse clicks, or data input.

Contemporary task mining tools combine them with various techniques, including optical character recognition (OCR), heat maps, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning algorithms to interpret user actions and recommend improvements to optimize task execution and make it faster, more efficient, and streamlined.

Task mining or process mining. What’s the difference?
When we employ task mining tools to whole processes, not just individual tasks, we speak of process mining, which typically uses a broader scope of data sources than just user interactions, also ingesting data from ERP systems, CRM tools, Product Information Management platforms (PIM), and other software.

In addition, process mining aims to discover, visualize, and evaluate the actual processes as they occur, helping organizations understand how tasks are related and where that relationship underperforms. Meanwhile, as already mentioned, task mining is primarily concerned with analyzing and optimizing the execution of specific tasks.

Since task mining is an automated procedure, we need software that executes it. Many applications help record and analyze user interactions by scraping desktop or mobile device-level events from individual or cohort workstations.

Depending on the technologies they draw from, they can be more or less advanced. For example, some older-generation, basic task-mining tools gather basic information based on mechanical user interactions like clicks, scrolls, screenshots, and time stamps. Advanced, AI-based solutions employ artificial intelligence to go deeper and capture information from the workstation and screens, offering a more detailed, insightful analysis of user activity.

Regardless of the tool or its level of advancement, all task mining applications return the analysis results in the form of reports, dashboards, and insights. These again differ in specificity and range of presented insights, from the more high-level information like the number of mouse clicks to detailed information like toggles between specific apps and interfaces.

There’s full steam ahead for the task mining tools market, growing at 85-95% yearly, so competition is ripe, with new players coming each year. The leaders of dozens of task- and process-mining applications include UiPath, Celonis, Kyp.ai, IBM Process Mining, Fluxicon Disco, and Process 360 Live. In this and the next article, we focus on the first three.

And why this choice? UiPath is the first platform that combines task mining capabilities with RPA (Robotic Process Automation); Celonis is a leading process management platform with a revenue of $365 million in 2023 and over 1,000 customers worldwide. Finally, Kyp.ai is a truly ingenious proposal heavily relying on the latest automation trends and AI innovations.

We will analyze the three competitors closely in a second, but first, let’s see how they can generally make a meaningful difference to your tasks and processes.

Task mining tools help optimize each step of process analysis by identifying inefficiencies and bottlenecks in individual tasks. Then, the compounded effect of task optimization enhances the entire process flow.

Regarding business process analysis and optimization, task mining tools particularly help with:

• Enhancing workflow visibility. Task mining makes work more transparent. This makes it easier to spot inefficacies and eliminate them from workflows. Simplified workflows, on the other hand, lead to better process efficiency.
• Measuring performance. One of the key functions of task mining is assessing and analyzing task execution to get insights into how individual performance can be improved. Again, when this happens, and employees improve their outcomes on the task level, it will positively affect the entire process.
• Reducing process gaps. Analyzing a team’s task efficiency helps capture areas that require revision and optimization. By extension, these will help eliminate process defects.
• Impacting process improvements. One example may be data entry. If you use task mining to pinpoint why it takes so long and then apply automation to speed it up, all the following tasks in the process will see faster execution. Same with quality assurance. Rooting out quality issues thanks to task mining enhances quality at a task level. This naturally improves the quality of the whole process and reduces the time and effort spent on retroactive problem-solving.

Now that we’ve covered some basic information about task mining technology and tools let’s dig into specific solutions to give you an exact view of what you might expect from task mining. We will see how UiPath v. Celonis v. Kyp.ai stack up against each other to choose the best one for your needs.

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