What's new for Process Mining in the Yokohama release

dangrady510 · ‎02-04-2025

For each ServiceNow release, I explore the city it is named after and attempt to draw parallels to our Process Mining enhancements. With Yokohama I didn’t have to look too far. Besides being known for its microbreweries (which almost side-tracked the rest of my research), I learned that Yokohama is known for many of Japan’s famous first’s – first bakery, brewery, photo studio, cinema, newspaper, public restroom and ice cream.

That’s appropriate because Yokohama will come to be known for a famous first when it comes to our Process Mining solution – our first AI Agent powered enhancement is being released in Yokohama with our work notes analysis summarization skill.

Yokohama is also considered Japan’s gateway to the world, symbolizing innovation and global connectivity. This is how many organizations experience Process Mining, as a gateway to unlock process efficiencies, providing insights used to innovate, optimize and transform how work gets done.

In the Yokohama release we’ve introduced several enhancements that both expand access to Process Mining as well as streamline the path to uncovering process improvement opportunities. Let’s review them.

In the Xanadu release we introduced the ability to cluster work notes on inefficient process transitions. An example of an inefficient transition might be work that is slowly moving from an in progress to a resolved state or work that is consistently moving between two groups. The clustering of the work notes helps streamline the process of identifying process improvement opportunities. Well in Yokohama we’ve taken it to another level. We’ve introduced a Now Assist skill that will summarize the work notes within those individual clusters, making it even easier to identify what actions we can take to improve the overall process.

AI powered work notes analysis summarization on transfer between IT Support Service Desk Level 1 and SURF Support – SSO assignment groups

As customers upgrade to Xanadu, Process Mining is enabled on their instances and a focused evaluation project for the incident process is provided. This project allows customers to experience Process Mining with their own data for up to 3600 incidents closed in the last 7 days. You can learn more about this evaluation project in this short video. This initial evaluation project was so well received that we decided to expand and in Yokohama we are delivering evaluation projects for both Customer Service Management cases and HR Service Deliver cases.

Evaluation projects for Incident, Customer Service cases, and HR cases that you’ll see in your Process Mining Workspace on upgrade to the Yokohama release. Mine the projects by using the menu in the upper right of the cards.

Same boundaries as the incident project, cases closed in the last 7 days up to 3600 cases. These projects are meant to give customers who have not yet experienced Process Mining an understanding of how it could help them get visibility into their processes and the opportunities to improve them.

Over the last few releases, we’ve significantly reduced our customers’ time to value with the introduction of Guided Setup experiences for project creation and Improvement Opportunities.

In Yokohama we’ve added a Guided setup experience for process configuration records. For every process (table) you want to mine (e.g. incident, HR case, demand) a process configuration record should be created to hold the base preferences and configurations for that process. For example, the process configuration record is where you define which fields to be using with root cause, cluster and work notes analysis for a given process. The process configuration record is also where you can define Improvement Opportunities that can be imported and reused by others as they create their own projects to analyze a given process. The Process Mining content packs available in the ServiceNow store for the different workflows deliver many of these process configuration records but for situations where we don’t offer a content pack, for example when you’ve authored your own process on the platform, you’ll want to create a process configuration record of your own this new experience will make it easier.

List of available process configuration records. If you see an empty list, be sure that you’ve activated the right Process Mining content packs from the store.

In addition to making, it easier to create new process configuration records, this new experience also gives you the ability to configure certain preferences that will make recommendations to others in the organization as they start to create their own projects for a given process.

Example screenshot of some of the process details you’ll be asked to provide as part of a process configuration.

For example, as process SME or Process Mining admin you can configure recommended fields to be used as Activity definitions or Breakdowns. This more prescriptive experience will help us get process mining insights in the hands of more people.

Activity definition recommendations presented to a business user creating a process mining project.

There are a handful of enhancements that I’m very excited about because they are based on customer feedback and aligned to a few very specific and common use cases.

The first one is the ability to apply transition filters prior to mining a project. Transition filters are a very powerful Process Mining capability. They allow you to use different steps in the process and the time between them to filter and isolate certain process data. For example, many customers use transition filters to look for automation opportunities by isolating work that takes longer than 2 minutes but less than 15 to move from a state of in-progress to resolved (

Sample transition filter used to isolate work that at some point is touched by the Service Desk

Up until Yokohama transition filters could only be applied within the Analyst Workbench after a project had been mined. In Yokohama, you can now apply transition filters prior to mining a project. This will allow you to create more targeted projects, significantly reducing the amount of data you need to include in each project. One specific use case this will help with is the “show me all situations where a given team/group was involved in the process”.

Visualized process map showing all work that at some point was touched by the IT Support Service Desk Level 1 group.

Prior to this enhancement you would have had to create a project with all the records and filter it after the fact, that is no longer the case.

There are also a few new transition filter types like “is empty”, “is not empty”, and “OR” support giving you the ability to attack even more use cases.

Next, we’ve added the ability to use journal and string fields as grouped activity definitions. This enhancement will help you analyze agent response/reaction time. When someone acts on a record a work note or a comment is typically updated on that record and very often that is the only indication that an action was taken.

Example of a process map with a “work notes added” node to allow us to analyze response and reaction time.

With this new enhancement we’ll be able to identify, visualize and analyze agent reaction/response times in relation to other steps of the process, like assignment and answer questions like “how long after the work moved to an assigned state was initial contact with the customer”.

The prior use case requires you to put multiple Activity Definitions on the visualized process map. One activity definition to represent the state changes another to represent the work note or comment update. It’s not uncommon for us to use multiple activity definitions in a single map. In fact, in the Xanadu release we added the concepts of views to allow you to toggle different activity definitions on and off within the analyst workbench. In Yokohama, you now have a little bit more control over how multiple activities that occur at the same time are represented on the map. For example, in prior releases if there was a state change and an assignment group change that occurred simultaneously, the assignment group change would appear first on the map because assignment group was alphabetically before state. For some, this order was confusing. In the Yokohama release there is now an order value you can apply to your activity definitions to control how they are represented on the map.

Example of a process map where the State activity definition is set to appear prior to the Assignment Group activity definition when the changes occur at the same time.

Those are some of the highlights for Process Mining in the Yokohama release. But there are more, like return of the Improvement Opportunity card view on the Summary and Insights page or the ability to use Integers as Breakdown fields, great for doing reassignment count analysis.

Interested in live demos of these enhancements? Check out this Process Mining Academy session.

Yokohama has been known as a gateway to innovation, setting the stage for firsts that have shaped Japan. Similarly, the Yokohama release marks a significant milestone for Process Mining, introducing AI-driven capabilities and expanding access to insights that help organizations refine and accelerate their workflows. Each of these enhancements, will continue to open new doors, new use cases, new opportunities to drive meaningful transformation

P.S. Yokohama also means “horizontal beach”. This blog post compares Process Mining to a metal detector that helps us comb the beach of inefficiencies that exist in all organizations.

Here is some additional Process Mining content that you might want to check out next: