Using Process Mining to make your TPRM workflows more effective

[Mary Hain]

This is one in a series of articles exploring how capabilities on the ServiceNow AI Platform can improve the effectiveness of your risk program.  

If you use Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) to run your third-party program, you know how complex workflows can be to identify, assess, and mitigate the risks--from the moment of first engagement through ongoing monitoring and eventual offboarding.

TPRM centralizes management of those third-party risks with workflows that automate due diligence, internal risk assessment via inherent risk questionnaires, external due diligence, and remediation for onboarding, assessments, and offboarding. With TPRM in place, you can manage the myriad of tasks associated with third-party risk management.

But organizations change. Third-party workflows evolve over time. Priorities change. Supplier requirements increase. Internal processes shift. Third-party team members come and go.

While these changes may seem insignificant, as a group they can create process inefficiencies over time. Due diligence starts to take longer. Assessments don’t capture all the data at the right time. Risk scoring gets diluted. Third-party data quality, process velocity, and compliance are compromised. 

Process Mining: The secret to improving your TPRM Workflows

Process Mining, now available to Risk customers with AI-native SKUs, is designed to avoid workflow drift by analyzing how well third-party workflows are running, identifying areas for process improvement, and recommending actions to take.

It works like this. Process Mining analyzes the data in TPRM to find areas of rework, long cycle times, and missing steps within and across workflows. It flags where time, effort, and compliance controls don't align with the baseline. It then delivers a process map with its supporting tasks, due diligence requests, and assessments—all in one view.  You see where things diverge from the intended flow.

For example, third-party issue resolution used to take seven days, but now it’s closer to nine. Process Mining tells you where the hiccups are and why. Are there approval bottlenecks? Unclear assessment requirements that delay third-party submission?  Compliance gaps? Evidence confusion?

Based on rules and pattern detectors tied to outcomes, Process Mining delivers improvement opportunities as a prioritized list for action. You can then take action to fix the flow. Using RPA bots, AI Agents, or coaching loops, you can automate manual, repetitive audit-response and better align with your third-party risk program priorities and goals. You can streamline processes and create clearer expectations. Later, you can use Process Mining to validate the effectiveness of the process improvements and decide if other actions are required.

We encourage you to consider using Process Mining to keep your third-party risk program on track. You can use the resources below, starting with the Academy webinar, to get you started.

Resources

1. ServiceNow Process Mining Academy - Process Mining for Risk Management
2. Eliminating Blind Spots: Process Mining for End-to-End Source-to-Pay & Third-Party Risk Insights
3. Process Mining in Minutes — Minute 11: Supplier Onboarding with Third-Party Risk Management
4. Process Mining Exposes the Hidden Bottlenecks in Supplier Onboarding
5. Process Mining for Source-to-Pay workflows: Driving Compliance, Quality, and Velocity
6. ServiceNow Docs — Third-Party Risk Management
7. ServiceNow Community — TPRM High Level Summary
8. ServiceNow Community — Getting started with your TPRM implementation and Process Mining ProductHub