Microsoft is officially entering the process mining and process automation ring with Power Automate Process Mining availability August 1.
Power Automate Process Mining general availability was announced at Microsoft's Inspire conference in Las Vegas. Microsoft beefed up its process mining and task mining capabilities with the acquisition of Minit in March 2022.
Microsoft Inspire: Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing, process mining, Meta and Epic partnerships
With process mining integration with Power Automate, Microsoft is looking to leverage its installed base of its Power platform to automate processes. Power Automate Process Mining has been in public preview since November 2022.
As previously detailed, the process automation platform scrum is going to be intense. In addition to process mining giant Celonis, UIPath, SAP and others are positioning to be automation platforms from different directions. The goal of these vendors is clear: Find process improvements with data from systems of record such as SAP, fix them and then automate them so businesses can continually improve.
Microsoft's Power Automate Process Mining includes the following:
- Templates to leverage corporate data, systems of record and flows from Azure, Power Automate, Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents and Azure to visualize processes as they actually happen.
- Tools for root cause analysis, drilldowns and recommended KPIs to identify inefficiencies and automation possibilities.
- Process templates for horizontal processes such as order-to-cash, peer-to-peer pay and supply chain.
- Low code automation tools to optimize processes across the Power Platform.
- Notifications in Microsoft Teams and Outlook when KPIs are at risk or not met.
- Ongoing monitoring of processes with the ability to create new goals and continually improve.
With the rollout of Power Automate Process Mining, Microsoft revamped its licensing for the Power Platform.
Along with the Aug. 1 general availability, Microsoft is adding a Power Automate Premium option for $15 per user per month. The license will provide unlimited cloud flows, digital process automation, robotic process automation and Power Automate Process Mining. Power Automate Premium replaces Power Automate Attended RPA per user.
In addition, Microsoft is adding a Power Automate Process license with access to an automation bot that can be used for unattended RPA or cloud-flow process that can be accessed by unlimited users at a company.
Power Automation Process Mining can also be available as an add-on for additional capacity at $5,000 per tenant per month with 100 GB Process Mining data storage.
For enterprises, the big question is whether process mining and automation is a separate category or something that is seen as an integration within a broader platform. Like analytics, there's a point where embedded features become good enough as part of a broader platform purchase.