Get familiar with process advisor
Process mining is built on the features and capabilities of the Microsoft Power Platform to help generate insights. Microsoft Power Automate for desktop allows you to record actions that you perform on your computer. Microsoft Dataverse stores the information from your processes. As a result, you need access to these technologies, from a licensing and security perspective, to take advantage of process advisor. If process advisor isn't listed when you go to Power Automate, talk to your administrator about your permissions.
You can access process advisor through Power Automate by selecting Process mining on the left navigation pane and then +Start here under Create new process.
Within the Create a new process dialog, you can create a new process by using Import data for an AI generated analysis of your business data, or by creating Recordings for an existing process, where process mining records keyboard entries and mouse clicks to analyze user-specific processes. So you can go from macro to micro with your process analysis.
If you cancel the Create a new process dialog and scroll to the bottom of your screen, You'll see some links to instructional videos, learning content, and sample data. All of these resources will help you make the most of this tool. One more thing, to make the recordings of your processes, you'll need to install Power Automate for desktop flow, so make sure that you download and install this program, because we'll use it deeper into this learning module.
If you have any existing processes already in Process mining they will show up under the Create new process options.
Selecting an existing process immediately presents you with a report screen rendered by PowerBI, showing a graphical summary of the process data. Copilot is also available to help you better understand and visualize this data. Some common things you'll see include a process map and process paths. Other chart items are process mining's attempts to portray your data. The chart is interactive and filterable, to help you zero in on areas of interest.
If your business process includes recordings, they will show up on the process Details screen, with information such as:
- Who created them
- At what time
- Their status
The possible statuses for recordings are as follows:
In progress - Recording is in progress, but it's also possible that the recording didn't start yet. Because recording happens in the desktop client, the web portal doesn't know about its status until it's saved. You can also view this status after the recording is saved because some processing is required after recording to make it ready to view.
Failed - An error occurred during recording processing. Create a new recording.
Not analyzed - The recording is processed and is available to view and edit, but it isn't marked as ready to analyze.
Ready to analyze - The recording is marked as ready to analyze and will be considered the next time you analyze the process.
Analyzed - The recording is analyzed and is part of the analyzed output that can be viewed through the Analytics screen.
Besides the recording information, you can view and manage the users who have access to your process.
Note
Contributors have access to add recordings and manage recordings that they created, while co-owners have access to create recordings and manage the recordings of others, including their own.
Analytics and recommendations will be discussed later in the module; the next task is to learn how to add a recording.