About ServiceNow Process Mining (formerly Process Optimization)
What is ServiceNow Process Mining?
Process Mining reduces the time it takes to identify process inefficiencies and improvement opportunities accelerating a business’s ability to streamline operations and achieve higher levels of productivity.
Process Mining is something that all process owners and process analysts should have at their disposal. It helps Process Excellence and Continual Improvement teams prioritize where to act and gives operations leaders across business functions visibility into the “whys behind their KPIs”.
Process Mining uses the data in audit logs to create visual business process flow in minutes. This allows in-depth analysis of processes to improve business outcomes.
Benefits of Process Mining on ServiceNow
- One click in-platform process mining of all workflows providing instant value
- Secure and easy to use. No need to send data outside of your ServiceNow instance
- Summary and insights to find hidden process inefficiencies
- AI powered root cause analysis to understand the "why" behind process issues
- Automation Discovery for Virtual Agent, RPA and DocIntel
- Direct drilldown access to underlying data for faster process bottleneck analysis
- Benchmarks and performance comparison to see before and after versions of the process
- Prebuilt content packs for common process issues provide accelerated time to value
- Closed loop process optimization process due to prebuilt connections with Performance Analytics, Continual Improvement Management, Automation Center and Benchmarks
Check out this quick overview and demonstration.
Am I ready for Process Mining?
This is a very common question and the answer is YES! This blog post walks you through why.
Should I run Process Mining in my production environment?
This is another very common question and the answer is again YES! This blog post helps explain some of the reasons why.
Is Process Mining different than Process Optimization?
No. In the Vancouver release we renamed Process Optimization to Process Mining. You will start to see that change reflected in the product, documentation, and communications moving forward.
Can you provide guidance on how to effectively scale Process Mining to more people in the organization?
Yes. Once people in an organization see the power and the benefit of Process Mining they want to get as many stakeholders involved as possible. This webinar recording details the process of creating a Process Mining program for your organization.
What training material is available?
Free Process Mining Essentials course on the Now Learning site. Get hands on experience using the Analyst Workbench and create your first project.
Process Mining Academy is a live session every month where we walk through specific topics, share best practices, and answer questions. Sign up here
How can I help educate others in my organization about the value in-platform process mining offers?
Where can I find information about what was new in each release for Process Mining?
- What is new for Process Mining in the Tokyo release | Academy Session
- What is new for Process Mining in the Utah release | Academy Session
- What is new for Process Mining in the Vancouver release | Academy Session
- What is new for Process Mining in the Washington D.C. release | Academy Session
- What is new for Process Mining in the Xanadu release | Academy Session
ServiceNow Process Mining Dataset and Participation
What Data is used in ServiceNow Process Mining?
Process Mining works with task execution audit logs (sys_audit table). Select any table that has audit logs enabled and customers can create a process model that will visualize the process within minutes. Process Mining uses the Predictive Intelligence infrastructure to create process maps and improvement insights.
How is data stored and handled by Predictive Intelligence?
Date governance and security of the Predictive Intelligence service is available on request. Contact your account team.
What questions can Process Mining answer for me?
The core idea behind process mining is to analyze data from a process perspective. With the in-platform Process Mining customers can easily answer questions such as:
- What does my as-is process currently look like?
- Is there waste and unnecessary steps that could be eliminated from the process?
- Where are the bottlenecks?
- Are there deviations from the rules and prescribed processes?
- Where are we spending the most time in the process?
- What is the most common cause for long running tickets?
- Channel Analysis - self service vs helpdesk vs Virtual Agent
- Where do we have the rework, loops, or repetitiion?
- Which vendors are causing delays?
- Assignment Group and SLA Breach Analysis
Our Use Case Series covers how to use Process Mining to answer some of these questions.
Do you have any examples of common findings or use cases?
The possibilities are endless, but this article details some of the findings and uses we've come across so far.
The Process Mining Use Case Series is a series of recorded demos of how to answer common questions with the solution.
How much data do I need to get value out of the solution?
There is no minimum amount of data that is necessary to get a Process Mining result. The important factor is duration of data, which is dependent on what questions you are trying to answer. Our recommendation is to start with monthly analysis.
Even if you have five cases; you can mine and visualize the routes those 5 cases went through.
Is there any performance impact?
There is no observable performance impact caused by Process Mining. Process Mining starts with the mining of audit trail data from sys_audit logs - which happens in small batch processes (the audit log query is broken up into 3600 record chunks).
Once the audit data is extracted, we use Predictive Intelligence(ServiceNow ML infrastructure) to train the process model so that it does not consume any CPU, Memory on your local instance. We have done performance testing with more than 10 million events in a process model.
Now that we've cleared up - this post helps you understand some of the benefits to running Process Mining in your Production environment.
ServiceNow Process Mining and Performance Analytics
Is Process Mining using Performance Analytics(PA)?
Process Mining has many touch points with Performance Analytics and it's capabilities. You can go from a Performance Analytics KPI/indicator on a dashboard to a Process Mining project with a single click to see the "Why behind the KPI".
In the Vancouver release you can start tying improvement opportunities to KPIs so you can get an understanding of where you process improvements will have the biggest impact.
You can learn more about the connections with Performance Analytics in this Academy session.
What are the benefits of using Performance Analytics and Process Mining together?
The Performance Analytics KPI provides you an early sign of a performance issue. You can then use Process Mining to easily investigate and find where the process bottlenecks are happening.
Example: My MTTR is trending upwards, click on the Process Mining icon and understand where the inefficiencies are within the process.
ServiceNow Process Mining and Continual Improvement
What are the benefits of using Continual Improvement Management and Process Mining together?
Process Mining has a direction to Continual Improvement Management. This connection allows you to submit your improvement initiative from Analyst Workbench with one click. This makes the makes the improvement submission and execution seamless and allows customers to drive KPI based business outcomes.
Learn more about the connection with Continual Improvement in this Academy session.
How can I show business value achieved through Process Mining efforts?
Once you have identified an improvement opportunity using the Analyst Workbench, submit it as an improvement initiative in the Continual Improvement app. Use Performance Analytics based indicators to track the progress and show the before and after state to quantify the impact. Continual Improvement provides a pre built dashboard that captures the KPI improvements over time.
Licensing ServiceNow Process Mining
How do I license Process Mining?
As of the Vancouver release, Process Mining is available as part for ITSM, CSM (Including Industry offerings), HR Service Delivery and Lifecycle Events, Field Service Management, Strategic Portfolio Management, and custom application created with Creator Workflows/App Engine. You can also mine process data from applications running outside the ServiceNow platform via an Automation Engine entitlement. Contact your Account team for details.
Learn more about Process Mining for each offering here.
We have licensed Process Mining for ITSM, can we use it for SPM?
Every product offering requires its own license. In this scenario, to use Process Mining on SPM tables/processes, you need to acquire a license because it is outside of the ITSM entitlement. Talk to your account team for what licensing options are best for you.
ServiceNow Process Mining Product Details
How many models can I create?
Once you are entitled to Process Mining, there is no limit on the number of models that you can create on the licensed workflows.
What roles are associated with Process Mining?
- Process Mining Admin
- As Administrator, you will have full access to all process mining configurations and settings that are available. Admin contains a power user.
- Process Mining Power User
- As a power user, you will have access to all process mining project settings and configurations, and you can create new projects for others to reuse. Power user contains viewer and analysis roles.
- Process Mining Analyst
- As an Analyst, you will be able to create your own process mining projects and share the analysis with others. Projects created by other users and shared with the Analyst can be viewed, edited, deleted, or shared. This role should be given to analysts, Process Owners, and Data team members.
- Process Mining Viewer
- As a Viewer, you will be able to view analyses that have been shared with you, however, you will not be able to create or delete your own process mining projects, edit or share them with others.
Is Process Mining FedRAMP compliant?
Yes. Check with Account team for release details.
Is domain separation supported?
Yes. Data level separation.
Is Process Mining available for self-hosted environments?
Yes as of the Vancouver release.
What languages are supported?
Process Mining supports all languages that are supported in the platform.
Can we deploy Process Mining on any ServiceNow table and what are the prerequisites?
Process Mining can be deployed on any table within ServiceNow. The only prerequisite is that the audit logs for your designated table should be enabled. If a customer would like to try Process Mining, they can enable it on a non-prod instance and mine up to 3600 records. As of the San Diego release there are 120 tables that have audit enabled OOTB. You can verify in an instance by using this url <instance_url>/sys_dictionary_list.do?sysparm_query%3Daudit%3Dtrue%5Esys_scope.vendor%3DServiceNow%26sysparm_first_row%3D1%26sysparm_view%3D
We want to try Process Mining in our sub production environment, but we are aren't seeing the audit data required to create a visualized process map?
Process Mining uses the audit data to generate the visualized process maps that help us find process inefficiencies and improvement opportunities. In order to ensure that relevant audit data is transferred as part of the cloning process you need to uncheck the "Exclude audit and log data" option in your clone profile.
You can read more about the cloning process here.
How do I activate/deactivate auditing for a specific table or field?
https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0723730
Can I mine interconnected processes like Request Management or HR Onboarding in a single model?
Ability to mine and map interconnected processes(MDM) was made available in the Tokyo release. Multidimensional Modeling will allow you to mine any number of interconnected processes in a single model so you can see the end to end flow of a cross department workflow.
Can I use ServiceNow Process Mining for process not running on the ServiceNow platform?
Yes! As of the Vancouver release customers can now import external audit/event log data from processes that are running on other applications and apply apply native ServiceNow Process Mining to get visibility into inefficiencies and improvement opportunities. Please review this Process Mining Academy session where we do a deep dive into this capability.
