Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes. The amount of work done by a human is reduced by predetermining decision criteria, and related actions and having the machines perform them. Automation uses control systems for operating equipment such as machinery, processes in factories, boilers, switching on telephone networks, steering, and stabilization of ships, aircraft, and other applications such that the human intervention is minimized.

The automated systems might face bottlenecks from time to time, and identifying them and increasing the performance is one of the challenges that could be solved using process mining. The model based on which the automation is running can be verified against the real-time log generated during the automation process via conformance checking. Any bottlenecks occurring in the execution of the automation process can be thus improved.