Eliminating Blind Spots: Process Mining for End-to-End Source-to-Pay & Third-Party Risk Insights
One of the things I love most about the ServiceNow platform is its ability to unify teams by breaking down information silos and enabling seamless workflow connections across multiple domains. This reduces friction, saves time, and fosters real collaboration. With a single data platform, organizations can streamline operations and improve efficiency.
However, this level of interconnectivity also presents challenges—many business outcomes are no longer isolated but deeply intertwined, requiring cross-functional dependencies to be managed efficiently. Gone are the days when teams could focus solely on their own priorities without considering how their work impacts others. Today, success is determined by how well we connect data, streamline workflows, and improve operational efficiencies to predictably meet business objectives.
The Source to Pay Lifecycle Challenge: Where Risk Mitigation Meets Efficiency
I get the privilege to speaking with many customers and coworkers, and many have shared a recurring challenge: supplier and procurement teams struggle to balance operational efficiency with third-party/vendor risk controls (and all of the underlying tasks that support a control). A well-structured supplier workflow should prevent unnecessary exposure to risk while ensuring an audit-ready process that doesn’t slow down business velocity.
One of my recent discussions I learned that for supplier/procurement lifecycle cases, those teams need to embed and include third party/vendor risk controls to ensure that a supplier workflow does not expose a company to risk and at the same time, provide an audit ready supplier workflow that will allow an organization to easily address and answer audits without slowing down their velocity of work. Side note, I’ve been told by customers that in some use cases and industries, having their teams consume 20% of their time to manually answer audit questions is not uncommon. I think we can do better.
Where does process mining fit in?
ServiceNow’s single data platform, coupled with ServiceNow’s Workflow Data Fabric extensibility, enables customers to automate and route work effectively between teams and in this use case, be able to embed third party/vendor risk controls. Process Mining takes this a step further by allowing teams to analyze the velocity and quality of their workflows, identifying where delays and inefficiencies occur.
For example, let’s say the goal is to resolve supplier cases within seven days, but only 30% of cases meet that target. Process Mining provides data driven insights into why that’s happening—whether due to approval bottlenecks, compliance checks, or inefficient handoffs—so teams can reduce or even eliminate friction points instead of relying on manual investigation.
Let’s not forget the bigger picture: when supplier inefficiencies impact procurement, this can delay invoices, disrupt payment cycles, and ultimately affect revenue targets—something every CxO cares about.
Identifying Gaps: The Power of Process Mining
Process Mining can offer teams a method to analyze these interconnected processes to determine where those gaps are, whether they are time based, or even compliance based. Every workflow is designed with an intended path, but in reality, deviations happen all the time. These variations can impact quality, velocity, and compliance—ultimately delaying procurement cycles and revenue generation.
By using Process Mining, teams can:
✅ Identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in source to pay and related vendor risk workflows.
✅ Analyze where time, effort, and compliance controls are misaligned
✅ Detect rework, long cycle times, and missing required steps within and across workflows.
Source to pay and supplier teams rely on internal risk teams to ensure proper controls are in place. Embedding third-party/vendor risk into the supplier lifecycle is critical—but without clear visibility, these controls and associated tasks can potentially slow down workflows.
Process Mining connects the dots, helping teams identify inefficiencies while providing evidence of why they occurred—so organizations can meet both operational and risk management goals without compromise.
Embedding Risk controls seamlessly into a supplier/source to pay workflows
An example process map of a supplier case and its supporting tasks as well as third party due diligence request and assessments. The ability to create this visibility in minutes and identify which process is creating friction gives operational leaders and process owners the focus on the problems impacting outcomes.
Above is an example list of improvement opportunities within a process mining project, based on rules and pattern detectors that are relevant to an organization’s outcomes. These can be related to focused KPI’s and take action right from the opportunity. This easily exposes your “short list” of where a team should focus to improve.
Closing the Loop: From Insight to Action
Once we’ve pinpointed where inefficiencies exist and what’s causing them, the next step is improving the process. Using automation, continual improvement, and analytics, we can:
🔹 Address improvement opportunities that are specific to your organization leveraging capabilities like RPA bots, AI Agents, and coaching loops.
🔹 Automate manual and low value repetitive work to streamline audits
🔹 Identify and address work that can be routed, categorized or approved more efficiently.
🔹 Continuously measure the impact of process improvements over time. With in-platform Process Mining, improving source to pay case management is no longer a guessing game—it’s a data-driven approach that delivers measurable, real-time results.
Final Thought: Ask the Hard Question
Where and why are we losing time, efficiency, and conformance—impacting the goals we care about? With Process Mining, teams can answer this question quickly and take action immediately. Whether it’s eliminating unnecessary steps, optimizing workflow transitions, or embedding better risk controls, the path to source to pay lifecycle excellence is just a few clicks away.
My team and I love starting process mining discussions with the following quote, but I think it’s good to end with this as well since it brings all back what we are trying to accomplish.
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. “
If you haven’t already taken the time to look at ServiceNow Process Mining here are some ways to learn a little more.
- Guide to getting started with Process Mining
- What workflows (ITSM, CSM, HR, etc) is Process Mining available for?
- How to create your first Process Mining project (Washington DC experience)
- Planning your ServiceNow Process Mining program
- How to use Process Mining to identify process improvement opportunities
- Process Mining FAQ
- Process Mining Academy
- Am I ready for Process Mining?
- Benefits of running Process Mining in a production environment
- Why behind the KPI: How Process Mining complements Performance Analytics
- Process Mining for external process data
- Automated Findings
