Process Mining can be applied to any process and provides visibility into bottlenecks, shines a light on redundancies and rework, points us towards specific automation opportunities that’ll ultimately help us accelerate service delivery and optimize experiences. It’ll help us increase automation rates and decide which automations or people and process adjustments will provide the biggest impact.
Take a look at that list of questions the solution will help you answer below – where are we spending the most time, which teams and groups are slowing us down, what is the root cause behind the delays – these are questions we all have, we can now get the answers in a matter of minutes with in-platform process mining.
There are just so many improvement opportunities out there once you get visibility into the reality of your processes.
This post will act a living document to capture some of the common findings and opportunities we encounter as we work across customers. As part of the ServiceNow in-platform process mining community it would great if we all started sharing our experiences/findings in the comments below. Perhaps your findings will inspire others to find ways to optimize their own workflows.
We've started a Process Mining Use Case series which is a library of short recordings walking through how to do the most common analysis. You can find that series here .
Our own Now on Now team has documented a list of 75 findings and inefficiencies here.
| Insight | Description | Part of Content Pack |
| Channel performance | Analyze which channels cause process and performance issues | No |
| Bad intake quality | Records that go immediately from New to On-Hold. Typically caused by poor user descriptions requiring the agent to ask validation questions | Yes |
| Compare Knowledge vs. Non Knowledge items | How effective is knowledge management and is it helping to streamline work | No |
| Multi-hop issues | Records that are going through two or more reassignments. | Yes |
| Identify unnecessary steps | Visually identify particular routes that go straight to a particular node(e.g. assignment group), whereby others similar records take a different route | No |
| Process variance analysis | Analyze which group of records take more steps compared to others prior to going to their end state. | No |
| Awaiting vendor/user response | Understand the impact of vendor/user performance on the overall MTTR and which improvements will have the biggest impact | No |
| Compliance analysis: Bypassing first level support | Although KPI's might look well, it is important that the process works as designed to control costs and risks. Records that go directly to a specialist team should be avoided. | No |
| Long close time: Records that take longer than 7 days to go from resolved to closed | The longer it takes to close a record the more overhead and effort it generates to manage the process. E.g., follow up with users, overhead in reports, etc. | Yes |
| Solution rejected issue: Incident resolution rejected by customer one or more times | Identify reversed process steps such as from resolved to new, in-progress, or on-hold | Yes |
| Process step missed: Incidents that go directly to Resolved state | Where do we bypass the designed process route or are there compliance issues. If this is the designed process, these are potential self service opportunities | Yes |
| Slow resolution time: Incidents that took more than 12 hours between Work in Progress and Resolved | Find queues and long idle times in the process | Yes |
| Long idle time: once record is assigned how long before agent begins work | Assigning records to the right assignment group quickly and accurately is evident, but dispatching work within the team should happen quickly and effectively | No |
| Incident opened, assigned to, and resolved by the same person | This is a potential compliance issue | Yes |
| Misuse of On Hold state: Incidents moving to On Hold state two or more times | On Hold/waiting for customer info stops the SLA clock from ticking. Often misused to make SLA | Yes |
| Impact assessment challenge: All records where priority has been changed after creation | Priority change has a big impact on the organization, especially from and to a Priority 1 | Yes |
| Compliance issue: Number of records where priority has been changed after state of Resolved | Records cannot be changed after it has been Resolved. Sometimes it is being changed to meet SLA or impact KPIs/Reports. | Yes |
| Vendor comparisons | Using breakdowns and model comparison capabilities you can compare vendor performance on e.g., services, CIs, etc that they deliver. | No |
| Top x slow transitions | Hand-over of work often involves changing queues, which slows the process down. Slow transition analysis will help you identify largest areas of potential improvement | No |
| Change success analysis | Analyze the impact of failed changes | No |
| Ping-pong analysis(bouncing records) | Analyze if assignment groups route work to a particular group and then the work is returned to the original group | No |
| SLA Breach analysis | Compare records that have breached SLAs with those that have not to understand bottlenecks and root cause | Yes |
| Problem impact analysis | Compare records that have a problem associated with them with those that do not to assess potential problem process delays | No |
| Caused by change analysis | Analyze the impact of a change on the overall performance of a record | No |
| Change of business service | A wrongly classified record can lead to reassignment and multiple triage stages | No |
| Knowledge Quality: Records with KB attached are reopened | Isolate reopened records that had a knowledge article attached and then breakdown by KB article to find potential KB improvement opportunities | No |
| Self Service opportunities | Records that go from New to Resolved to Closed - Clustering and Root Cause analysis should reveal Self Service opportunities | No |
This list will continue to grow, keep coming back for more.
Other Useful Process Optimization Content:
Why and what of In-Platform Process Mining(video presentation and demo)
On Demand Process Optimization Training(NowLearning)
