Process Mining Use Case Series

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“Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change”

                                                                                                                                                     -Wayne Dyer

At this point most organizations have an endless supply of dashboards filled with visualized data and KPIs that tell us how different aspects of the business are performing. 

What most organizations don’t have is the ability to answer all of the follow up “Why” questions that are generated by all of those dashboards.  And it’s the answers to these "Why" questions that help us make the necessary changes to improve our KPIs.

Sure, you can drill down and get different slices of the same data, but when we are talking about KPIs that are related to our business processes, process mining solutions like ServiceNow’s in-platform Process Mining provide next level insight into the process inefficiencies and non-conformant activities that are slowing us down and impacting productivity. It’s these insights that give us the direction we need to improve.

Process mining is a new muscle for many of us, but someone once said “all progress takes place outside of our comfort zone.”

When we start training a new muscle it’s always good to have a few examples of different exercises to help motivate and get us going.

In this Process Mining Use Case Series we will share some common questions that Process Mining can help answer and different ways you can use the solution to identify impactful improvement opportunities. 

In addition to the individual recordings below we recently ran a jumpstart session where we covered some of the more common ones.  You can find that recording here.

Use Case	Description
Multi-hop or “Ping Pong” Analysis	Process Mining can be used to help us get a better understanding of how often certain reassignments are happening, which hand-offs are taking longer than others, and where do we have these dreaded “Ping Pong” situations.
Reopened Work Analysis	Regardless of the reason why the piece of work is reopened this is probably not the optimal experience for the given stakeholder which will impact our satisfaction metrics, and the fact that we didn’t get it right the first time will also have a productivity impact.
Channel Analysis	Process Mining can be used to help analyze work coming in view different channels and isolate opportunities to improve intake experiences as well as create new self service offerings which will increase the speed and productivity of the organization.
SLA Breach Analysis	Process Mining can be used to help analyze tickets that have breached a certain SLA.  This post and recording shows a technique for focusing on those specific records in the Analyst Workbench
Analyzing work that takes longer to route than resolve	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.
Analyzing reprioritized work	Wrongly prioritizing an IT incident can have significant negative consequences for an organization. When IT incidents are not correctly prioritized, it can lead to a host of problems that may affect business operations, customer satisfaction, and overall productivity. We can use process mining on the ServiceNow platform to help analyze the prioritization of incidents.  The same approach can be used to analyze how any work (customer service cases, hr cases, etc) being managed on the ServiceNow platform is being reprioritized.
On Hold Reason Analysis	From a service delivery perspective putting a piece of work whether it be an IT incident or maybe a Customer Service case into an On Hold state can have both positive and negative impacts.  Process Mining will allow us to use the “On Hold Reason” field in our process analysis. This will help organizations answer questions like: How long are tickets “awaiting vendor” input and do we have situations where we need to go back to the vender more than once? Which types of tickets are “awaiting caller” and which channels are generating those situations more often? How many incidents were “awaiting change” and what was the impact on overall resolution time?
Identifying Approval Bottlenecks for Requested Items	Process Mining can provide visibility into situations where the approval step of the process is causing significant delays so we know where we might want to make some adjustments to the process.
Analyzing Change Risk Recalculations	In this use cases we will focus on a situation where the Calculated Risk of a Change is recalculated and downgraded, potentially causing that Change not to be taken as seriously during the approval process.
Analyzing the impact of a process change	In this use case we focus on how Process Mining can be used to do a side by side comparison and give us visibility into how a process is behaving both before and after a change so we know what’s working and what’s not.
Identifying automation opportunities	In this use case we focus on how Process Mining can be used to identify automation opportunities and help reduce repetitive manual tasks.
Day Shift vs Night shift analysis	A fun use case that showcases how process mining can really help you hone in on specific times. How we can use condition filtering to achieve time bases analyses!
Using Root Cause Analysis	Don't know where to start your analysis? Not a problem, use AI to give you some suggestions! Get to the bottom of what could be causing the pain points in your process
What's my bottleneck?	What's the hold up? Which parts of your process are taking the longest, is that okay or something to be worried about? This use case will help you identify which steps in your process are the worst offenders and where you can use your problem solving skills most effectively!
Did my implementation work	I made a big change in my process to fix something that wasn't working before. How can I prove that what I did is working? Use process mining to back you up
Guided Improvement Opps - Building new detectors	Improvement opportunities are super powerful and a huge time saver. It's easier than ever now to create these so that you have the same insights surfaced to you automatically each time!
Finding things in your process that SHOULDN'T be changing	Fields like configuration items, categories, or even subcategories DRIVE a lot of our automation and therefore our processes. If we didn't get it right the first time it could be causing some headaches!
How to isolate and analyze all of the work a group/team has touched	The traditional reporting and analytics on the platform allows us to look at the current state of a record so you can report on how much work is currently assigned to your group or once the work is finished you can isolate all of the work that your group has closed.  But getting a complete picture of all the work your group has touched at some point isn’t easy. Process Mining can help generate that complete picture of all the work your group has touched and this helps us get an understanding of which groups are consistently transferring work to our group and where we are transferring work too.
Analyzing incidents caused by changes	Process Mining we can easily start answering the hard questions of where and why incidents are caused by changes. Did the change process miss a step? Are change workflows not following best practice? What type of changes are more prone to an incident? Surface opportunities to focus governance, workflow and automation to ensure changes don't inflict unnecessary work and pain on an organization.
Use Process Mining for Knowledge Management	Mine knowledge management tables and its related source tasks to: Improve on knowledge articles publishing times from start to finish Prove that resolution times decline when effective kb articles are used Show evidence of poor quality knowledge negatively impacting the KPIs to encourage ownership groups to create strong content, that may potentially be leveraged for agentic AI Spot assignment groups that initiate and leverage kb articles Use breakdowns to reveal topics, flagged, view counts, AQI and much more for focussed knowledge improvements

We will continue to add to this library over time.  And of course we’d love for you to start sharing some of your own exercises(use cases) with your peers in the comments section below.

Remember –

“If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.”

-Thomas Jefferson

*Process Mining was formerly known as Process Optimization prior to the Vancouver release.

For more in depth enablement or training check out:

Process Mining Academy

Process Mining Essentials Now Learning Course

Process Mining FAQ