The Company

UltimateSuite has an interesting backstory, spinning off from StringData in 2020 and closing a first round of funding, from Tensor Ventures, in October 2021. Robert Samanek leads the company, which is headquartered in Prague. StringData and the eventual founders of UltimateSuite originally developed graphical user interface (GUI)-focused automation/RPA tools for the financial services sector. The two companies still work closely together, though UltimateSuite is now a standalone company.

The Technology

UltimateSuite offers a task mining application that aims to differentiate itself by automating as much analysis of the collected data as possible. In practice, most task (and process) mining tools show you what is happening rather than pre-processing the collected data to provide you with analytical insights.

Structurally, UltimateSuite describes four stages to its task mining activity:

1. First is the initial data capture stage in system events (clicks, scrolls from the desktop, etc.). This tool goes further than most because it can also capture from terminal emulator environments (still widely in use) and plans to add screenshot capture later this year.
2. UltimateSuite is then able to pre-process and enrich the captured data through identifying points of interest and specific activities, etc.
3. Third, UltimateSuite mines this data to discover defined tasks (for example, a credit check).
4. Finally, the program outputs the data and activity analysis to various formats, be they dashboards or documents, for use by the business analyst or manager.

In architectural terms, UltimateSuite has a module providing a probe that gathers data from a user workstation. That data is then passed to a data processing server connected to a business intelligence (BI) system to extract, further process, and ultimately display a visualization of the data on the business analyst’s workstation (see Figure 1).

So, what truly makes UltimateSuite different from its competitors? First, many of them are limited to essentially recording and decoding videos of screen activity. UltimateSuite takes a different approach and works at a much more granular data capture level, automating or pre-processing the data effectively to identify specific task activities. In other words, it automates much of the manual analysis that task mining tools typically require.

Also, setting up UltimateSuite is surprisingly simple. Typically deployed on-premises, though a virtual private cloud option is also available, the system normally does not require integration and can be up and running almost immediately. All the user has to do is define the beginning and endpoints of the process or task to be analyzed. As this is a free-standing, low-touch environment, data is collected and analyzed in near real-time. These are all good things, but in our analysis, what stood out was the flexibility to view and use the analyzed data gathered by UltimateSuite in multiple different formats to meet your specific use case.

This brings us to the conundrum regarding UltimateSuite: though it is technically a task mining tool, it is more of a workplace optimization tool in our analysis. It can be used very effectively to initiate an RPA project (for example), but that seems to be a minimal use case for something as extensive as this. It’s not technically a workplace analysis system, but that is what UltimateSuite does, and we see it as best placed for long-term continuous improvement analysis.