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DISCOVER
Assess, Prioritize & Prove Value with Automation Discovery
DISCOVERY SERVICES
Find Your Value First
Automation Discovery is a structured consulting engagement that identifies, prioritizes, and validates your highest-impact automation opportunities before development begins. Ashling's discovery approach aligns leaders on what value means, how it's measured, and which processes and use cases will deliver it fastest.
We’ve had a great experience working with Ashling. They took the time to understand our business, were flexible to our needs, and worked exceptionally with our supply chain team to deliver the automations within a tight timeframe.
[The discovery with communications mining] was absolutely painless on our end of things. It was done within four weeks. We were the last automation initiative to start and the first to finish and show real impact.
Ashling combines deep automation expertise with a really strong understanding of our business. They are proactive, well-prepared for every interaction, and translate complex technical concepts into clear, actionable recommendations.
Clear and concise communication. Utilized great tech experience combined with business understanding to provide obtainable efficiency goals.
WHAT WE DO
Discovery Services
Discovery Diagnostic
How do you move from competing automation ideas to a funded, executable roadmap?
Most automation programs don't fail in delivery — they fail before it starts. The wrong processes get prioritized, feasibility goes unchecked, and teams build with confidence in the wrong direction. The Discovery Diagnostic fixes that.
Ashling's flagship discovery offering takes you from backlog to boardroom-ready roadmap in 4 to 8 weeks. Our advisors work across your organization in four structured phases: aligning on goals and value drivers, assessing readiness and baselining volumes, mapping opportunities to strategic objectives, and confirming solution direction with governance and delivery roles in place. Every opportunity is qualified against real operational data using a process intake completed by your team before the engagement begins.
You leave with a prioritized pipeline, a sequenced delivery roadmap, and an executive narrative your leadership can fund and your delivery team can act on immediately.
What you get:
- Opportunity View with automation-ready use cases and estimated value by department
- Strategy Alignment mapping automation candidates to your business value levers
- Department-Level Value Potential across current processes and new capabilities
- Sequenced Development Roadmap accounting for complexity, infrastructure, and delivery readiness
- AI and IA Readiness Assessment across governance, change management, process, and technology
- High-Level Architecture Review
- Executive Readout your leadership can fund, defend, and track
Discovery with Process Intelligence
How do your processes actually run and where is that costing you?
Every organization has two versions of its processes: the one in the documentation, and the one that actually runs. The gap between them is where throughput slows, errors compound, and automation investments miss their targets.
Discovery with Process Intelligence connects event log data across your systems to build a digital twin of your end-to-end processes — a data-driven map of how work actually flows, where it stalls, where it gets reworked, and what it costs. From that baseline, we identify where automation and AI will have the most measurable impact on speed, cost, and accuracy, and build a prioritized action plan your delivery team can execute.
Not sure if your data and systems are ready for process mining? Start with our Data Discovery and Analytics Assessment — a lightweight 2 to 4 week engagement that evaluates your current analytics capabilities, surfaces data and visibility gaps, and confirms your readiness before you commit to a full process intelligence program.
What you get:
- Prioritized list of business areas for advanced analytics, with data cleanliness recommendations
- Estimated impact of process visibility and analytics gaps benchmarked against APQC and industry data
- Process mining and analytics roadmap for the next 1 to 3 years
- Bottleneck, rework, and delay analysis with root cause identification
Discovery with Communications Mining
What's actually coming into your shared inboxes and what should you be automating first?
Most teams know their shared inboxes are creating drag. Few can quantify how much, what's driving it, or where to start. Discovery with Communications Mining answers all three questions in four weeks.
Using UiPath Communications Mining, we analyze your shared inbox traffic and classify email demand by type, volume, and pattern. From that baseline, we identify and rank your highest-impact automation opportunities, then validate one through a focused pilot to confirm feasibility and impact before you scale. Available for general business functions and as a contact center-specific engagement.
Not sure if your data and systems are ready for process mining? Start with our Data Discovery and Analytics Assessment — a lightweight 2 to 4 week engagement that evaluates your current analytics capabilities, surfaces data and visibility gaps, and confirms your readiness before you commit to a full process intelligence program.
What we deliver:
- Intelligent Email Insights Model with classified demand, volume analysis, and pattern identification
- Development Roadmap and Executive Readout with a sequenced automation pipeline ready for delivery
Driving Value for 300+ Leading Brands
Your Next Automation Win Starts Here.
FREE GUIDE
Start Agentic AI the Right Way, with One Use Case That Actually Proves Value
Explore Ashling’s practical guide to picking the right Agentic AI use case, proving value in weeks, and turning that win into a repeatable roadmap you can scale with confidence.
From Discovery to Successful Automation Programs
Discovery FAQs
Ashling Discovery Services help you decide what to improve first and how to do it. We map value, identify the best processes to target, and produce a prioritized roadmap tied to business outcomes.
We provide three approaches to discovery:
Discovery with Communications Mining Analytics is a way to turn inbox traffic into clear categories, volumes, and patterns. We identify what customers, partners, or employees ask for most, then surface the best automation opportunities and validate one with a pilot.
Discovery with Process Intelligence is a way to use system event data to map how work actually flows end-to-end. We build a “digital twin” of the process, then identify where delays, rework, and bottlenecks are created so you know what to fix first.
The Discovery Diagnostic is a structured approach to build a prioritized pipeline and roadmap across departments. We assess impact, feasibility, and readiness so your team can move from ideas to a plan that is practical to deliver and maintain.
Discovery helps you avoid building the wrong thing. It makes sure you are solving the right problems at the right time, with a plan you can deliver confidently.
Discovery aligns teams on priorities, gives you a clear picture of where value is hiding, and turns ideas into a sequenced plan that reduces risk and speeds up results.
Discovery confirms feasibility early. It surfaces data gaps, system constraints, process complexity, and change management readiness before you build, so you do not get stuck mid-project.
Discovery identifies the fastest paths to impact and removes ambiguity upfront. That means your delivery team spends less time debating and reworking, and more time implementing and optimizing.
To get the most value quickly, we ask for a few simple inputs up front:
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Confirm your executive sponsor Choose a leader who can align priorities, unblock decisions, and keep the engagement moving.
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Commit to the workshops Make sure key stakeholders can actively participate in working sessions. Discovery works best when decisions happen in the room.
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Select 3–5 functions to include Identify 1–2 reps per function who know the day-to-day process and can share real examples, exceptions, and pain points.
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Bring basic cost data Ask your HR or Finance lead to provide FTE cost inputs so we can size value accurately and compare opportunities fairly.
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Complete the intake pre-work The process intake document captures a process inventory grounded in how work is actually done—enabling us to identify and qualify automation opportunities without bias. From there, we collaborate to optimize and reimagine processes for maximum impact.
After discovery, we move you into a steady operating cadence that keeps value delivery predictable, keeps the pipeline healthy, and helps the program scale across teams and business units without losing control.
The Operating Cadence is built on four disciplines:
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Financial Value Management: We treat value like a financial commitment, not a retrospective metric. Value is planned up front, validated at key checkpoints, and tracked quarterly to keep a clear line from platform usage to business outcomes.
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Roadmap, Pipeline, and Ongoing Discovery: We maintain a rolling 12-month, value-backed pipeline. Discovery continues, but it is governed, so expansion into new teams and processes stays controlled and repeatable.
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Delivery and Execution Discipline: We set quarterly delivery expectations and sequence work based on value, not convenience. This creates accountability and ensures execution decisions match the value commitments you have made.
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Licensing and Platform Consumption: We actively manage utilization, capacity, and adoption signals to prevent renewal surprises, reduce scale risk, and confirm you are maximizing what you already own before expanding.
Takeaway: Discovery gets you the roadmap. The Operating Model makes sure you deliver on it, quarter after quarter. Value is managed as an ongoing commitment, which is what enables sustainable growth at scale.
We sustain and scale by keeping the right conversations happening with leadership, on a predictable cadence. When goals, metrics, and decisions stay connected, adoption becomes natural and expansion stays controlled.
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Business goals and metrics We tie automation work to the KPIs leadership already cares about, like throughput, cost per unit, quality, and labor productivity. Those metrics connect directly to OKRs and the roadmap, so platform usage stays linked to outcomes the business is actively tracking.
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Insight, benchmarking, and decision support We review trends vs plan, compare performance to peers, and normalize productivity metrics so leaders can answer questions like: “What should capacity and staffing look like for an organization like ours?” We also use a consistent tech decision framework to match use cases to platform capabilities and ensure current licenses are fully leveraged before adding tools.
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Strategic alignment, operating model, and partnership As the program grows, we keep alignment tight across executive, program, and project levels. Pod-based resourcing by domain and value stream makes scaling structured, not chaotic. And we stay aligned with software partners to bring market perspective and new platform capabilities into roadmap decisions.
Program enablers: These are the repeatable mechanisms that keep decisions consistent as you scale: disciplined tech selection, scalable delivery structure, and clear governance.
Takeaway: As business goals evolve, automation priorities evolve with them, guided by metrics, insight, and peer perspective.