This post is part of the Process Mining Use Case Series where we’ll focus on different techniques to identify process inefficiencies, non-conformant activities, and improvement opportunities. These posts will be broken into two sections – how to do the analysis and how to configure the Process Mining project.
One of the many things that makes process mining different than your more traditional reporting and analytics is the ability to use the steps/transitions within the lifecycle of a piece of work to identify opportunities.
For example, one interesting way to look for self-service opportunities, or potential routing or staffing issues would be to focus on pieces of work that take a long time to get to the In Progress state, but then take a relatively short time to get to the resolved or closed state.
You can find other Use Case recordings here
How to do the analysis
This approach can be applied to any workflow (Incident, HR Case, Customer Service Case, etc.) and does not require any additional/special Process Mining configuration beyond the out of the box content packs offered with a given workflow.
In this example, we will use HR Case workflow for the analysis.
Open your project to the Analyst Workbench view.
Click on the Transitions option in the Advanced filters section in the lower left of the Analyst Workbench.
This will bring you to the transition filter builder:
We are going to create 2 conditions. For HR cases, we will use the typical state names. The first will isolate the HR Cases that took longer than 3 days to go from the Draft state to the Ready state. We will use the Ready state since this is typically when a HR case as has been assigned and triaged. Then we’ll create second condition to further refine the HR Cases to just the ones that after taking 3 days to get to Ready took less then 30 minutes to resolve and get to the Closed Complete state.
In the first condition box set State is Ready
Click the Add next activity button.
Adjust the “Followed by” value to be “Eventually followed by”. This is an important distinction. It allows us to differentiate between the State of Draft being immediately followed by the State of Ready and the State of Draft eventually being followed by the State of Ready (with maybe some other States or activities in between, Suspended, for example).
In the second step box set the condition to be State is “Ready” which, for many HR workflows is when work is assigned and routed.
For the purposes of this example, we are using the Ready state. If you are using the Assigned to or Work in Progress state , depending how your workflow is configured, one could use that. Perhaps you want to set up a model that has both an activity of State and Assigned To. In that scenario you may want to set the second condition to Assigned To is not empty. There will be many ways to approach this use case, we just want to highlight one way to use transition filters to accomplish it.
We now have this Transition filter set up to look for all HR Cases that go into the state of Draft and eventually end up in the state of Ready. We also want to add the constraint of it taking longer than 3 days to get there.
Click on the Add constraint option on the far left.
For this constraint, we need to define between what steps we want to apply. In this case, from the first to the second step.
Next thing we need to do is apply a time constraint, in this case we want to know when it takes longer than 3 days to move an HR case from step 1(Draft) to step 2(Ready After that is completed, apply the Add Constraint button.
Now let’s add the additional condition of taking less than an hour to go from Ready to Closed Complete.
Click on Add next activity.
Set the “Followed By” value to “Eventually followed By”
Set the condition to State is Closed Complete
Set the Occurrence is value to Last. This will ensure that we are focused on the final time the HR Case moves to the Closed Complete (Eliminate situations where an case was resolved quickly and then rejected)
The last thing we need to do is set a second time constraint of 30 minutes for this step. Click on Add constraint once again
Set the Max duration 30 minutes. This means to only capture HR cases where there was less than 30 minutes between when it was set to the Ready state and when it eventually got set to Closed Complete
Next, Click on the Add Constraint
If this is the first time you are running this combination you will be notified that a Task is running in the background.
You can use the Scheduled tasks panel on the right-hand side of the screen to view the result of the mining.
Once you have the filtered map you can click on the Draft to Ready node transition to validate that we have only have HR cases that took longer than 3 days to move through this transition. You can see the average time in my example is 1 week and that the histogram maxes out with HR cases over 3 weeks
Once an HR case is in the Ready State, you can easily see all the paths to get to the Closed Complete state, are all under 30 min.
Once we have this subset of HR Cases, we can now start using our Breakdown filters and other Analyst Workbench capabilities to dig deeper into where the opportunities might lie.
Other investigative tools within Process Mining can also provide meaningful evidence of the contributing factors that is causing this inefficiency. Root Cause Analysis, providing the key contributing factors, Requestor Intent, using machine learning to cluster the unstructured, rich information within the HR case description.
The purpose of this post was to give you an understanding of one way to approach doing some analysis of work that is taking a long time to get started but once it’s started the actual work is completed very quickly. Could there be routing optimization opportunities, self-service opportunities, staffing adjustments, etc.
As with all analysis there will be multiple ways to look at and interpret the results.
How to configure the Process Mining Project
This analysis should not require any special configuration. The out of the box project for each of the workflows will enable you to do this type of analysis.
One potential option would be to add the Assigned To field as an Activity. Then track from when State is Ready to when Assign To is not empty. Then from When Assigned To is not empty to Resolved.
If you choose to take this approach you might want to isolate your initial project to a specific group to control the number of Assign To values on the map.
If you are looking for more in-depth training you can use the Process Mining Academy library of content
You can find other Process Mining use cases here
Additional Resources
Process Mining Fundamentals - ServiceNow University
Process Mining Advanced - ServiceNow University
