Origin Energy to use process and task mining in UiPath expansion

Origin Energy has made a fresh three-year commitment to UiPath, with both process and task mining forming a key part of the utility’s progression plans.

Image credit: Origin Energy.

The company re-platformed its robotic process automation (RPA) onto UiPath back in May 2019. At the time, uses for RPA had been in the area of test automation, before expanding to automations of processes that interacted with its SAP system.

Head of IT automation and insights Anthony Kaelin told the recent SAP NOW A/NZ conference that the new three-year deal with UiPath would see the use of the vendor’s technology expanded further.

Some of that work will occur in Origin’s SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) ecosystem.

“In the ERP space, we’re driving test automation with the UiPath platform, that’ll improve [things] whenever we’re doing an SAP upgrade or any kind of changes,” Kaelin said.

Origin Energy is also looking to harness both process mining and task mining capabilities of UiPath’s technology as well.

Both are effectively ways of ‘discovering’ or mapping out processes; the former utilises system logs and data, while the latter effectively observes what people do when interacting with a process.

The outcome is roughly the same: to identify bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement.

“What we want to get out of process mining is let the logs feed into the process mining, let us find the insights, see where bottlenecks are, and get a first pass at the process,” Kaelin said.

“Once you’ve got that and you want to automate something there, you can improve the process first before you automate. I think that’ll be a real ‘feed’ into our pipeline [of automation work]. 

“Then, we want to understand how people are using multiple systems and applications to deliver their processes. Sometimes they’re using workarounds, we’ll pick that up with task mining. 

“We’ve done some trials with task mining, and I expect that we’ll use more of that going forward.”

Kaelin said that the three-year agreement with UiPath meant having access to the vendor’s “enterprise success” support package - technical expertise that Origin could tap into as it progresses its process automation efforts.

The majority of Origin’s efforts are about cost avoidance rather than cost savings.

“There’s absolutely cost saving, but we’re finding that 70-to-80 percent are about cost avoidance,” Kaelin said.

Kaelin also noted that Origin had architected its automations to monitor for any fault conditions, and to automatically raise a ticket for them in its service management platform.

“What we did at Origin is we connected the output files of UiPath so when there was a failure in an automation, for whatever reason - could be bad data or anything - it was connecting directly into ServiceNow to raise an incident, so … nothing ever would fall through the cracks,” he said.

“We’d have monitoring there that would actually pick that up, so then it’d create the incident and then our team would be able to go through that and make sure the process owner was informed.

“If we had to go back to manual processes for whatever reason, we can do that.”