Universal Requests (UR) connect your service delivery organizations such as IT and HR through a single request experience. The end user typically does not care about the ticket type they are opening e.g. incident or request. They just want service!
A Universal Request can be fulfilled by multiple teams allowing collaboration across records (ticket types) of HR case, incident and others along with the ability to ‘transfer’ for smooth hand-offs between teams. You could have a centralized tier 1 service desk (shown below) where end users create a UR which the service desk routes to correct fulfiller groups through the correct ticket type i.e. incident, HR case or custom case. Alternatively, a service desk could be decentralized. In either scenario, it provides a seamless unified user experience and avoids dead ends of wrong ticket type created by end users.
Process Mining mines data to provide a visualised flow of work in your processes highlighting anomalies and bottlenecks along with detecting bad patterns to initiate ideas for process improvements. It also offers robust machine learning features that analyze root cause and unstructured data e.g. work notes, short description and much more.
Benefits of Process Mining ‘universal requests’
- Spot ping pong between departments (e.g. IT and HR): It reveals where tickets were routed back and forth leading to longer fulfilment or resolution times. It highlights improvement opportunities of coaching teams, publishing effective knowledge articles or automating non-value-adding steps.
- Break silos: It offers the ability to visualize cross departmental flow of tickets to perform a holistic analysis of bottlenecks and process anomalies.
- Uncover reasons for SLA breaches: It shows at what point during the team collaboration the SLAs were breached and how it could be avoided.
Guidance for mining ‘universal requests’
- Consult your system administrator to fully understand how ‘universal request’ was configured in your instance.
- Which fields are filled out or left empty upon transfer of a ticket e.g. route_reason, close_code, assignment group.
- Understand table relationships (parent-child, reference) between ‘universal request’ and other record types.
- Keep in mind the difference between: UR created first and then routed versus UR created only when primary ticket was transferred, for example, when HR case was transferred to IT.
- State clear hypothesis that you are testing through mining. Example: case resolution times are high due to excessive hops between IT and HR.
- Be aware of pitfalls where your analysis could be misled. Example: unwanted ping pongs between teams as opposed to essential re-routing for collaborating to jointly fulfil a request.
- Pre-requisites for mining are:
- UR setup must be complete in your instance
- UR process is being used in your organization and data exists to mine
- Audit is turned on for UR table
Steps for mining ‘universal requests’
- Setup the ‘Process Configuration’ record for UR
Access your ‘Process Configuration’ as shown below and create new entry for ‘universal request’ table.
It is recommended to use ‘process configuration builder’ available in the recent release for a quick and easy setup.
Fill out process details in the guided setup as shown below. The mandatory steps are to specify which data fields you would like as ‘activities’ on the process map. The popular fields are ‘state’ and ‘assignment group’.
You could fill out breakdowns by dot-walking from 'primary ticket' to fields – ‘assignment group’ and ‘transfer reason’.
Please feel free to pick the data fields relevant for you and available in your instance.
You could hop directly to ‘improvement opportunities’ step.
As displayed below, on the ‘improvement opportunities’ step, the system automatically suggests improvement opportunities (bad process behaviours / patterns) based on what you provided as activities in the previous step. ‘Add selected’ and proceed to finish the setup.
- Mine & review results
We will create 3 mining projects to cover the popular use cases.
* Sample data used for mining is not strong enough to show compelling results but good enough to understand the capabilities.
2a. Use Case: Mine ‘universal request’
Access Process Mining Workspace and ‘create new project’.
At step 1 of the guided setup show below, specify ‘universal request’ as the table you would like to mine.
At step 2, provide activities as ‘assignment group’ and/or ‘state’. Breakdowns could be 'assignment group' and 'route reason' of the primary ticket.
After the mining is complete, the process map on the ‘analyst workbench’ will reveal where the hops between HR and IT took place and the time taken for it.
On the ‘summary and insights’ page of the project, you will see the ping-pong patterns between the teams (displayed below).
2b. Use Case: Mine ‘universal request’ with ‘SLA’
Here we have mined Universal Request along with SLA. At step 2 of project creation, toggle the SLA button (shown below) to add ‘Task SLA’ table quickly and easily to the analysis. You don’t need to manually add a child entity.
You can see below the point at which SLAs were breached, and which group was holding onto the tickets. The breakdowns allow further insights into ‘transfer reason’ and more.
2c. Use Case: Mine ‘universal request’ with ‘HR Case’
At step 2 of guided setup for project creation, add ‘HR Case’ as child table as shown below.
You can see below the interplay between Universal Request and HR Case and where time could be saved by improving the process.
