Discovering process inefficiencies

We rely on process mining to find friction points that slow down daily ServiceNow processes, then we systematically fix these issues to be more productive.

At ServiceNow, we execute over 900 business processes every day. As our number of employees and customers grew, our processes started to become more complex, and we couldn’t see exactly where process delays were happening. We wanted to go beyond the “what” and see the “why” behind the metrics.

Although our large multi-step and multi-transition processes were running every day, individual processes weren’t completely optimized to drive maximum efficiency and productivity. We were using our own products like ServiceNow Process Automation Designer and Flow Designer to help us document, map, and visualize processes, but we struggled to identify bottlenecks within each workflow. It was difficult to know where to start and what to fix to drive more productivity and enable better employee and customer experiences.

Putting process mining to the test at ServiceNow

Using our in-platform Process Optimization product, we launched a pilot to find and fix trouble spots within everyday workflows. Specifically, we needed a solution that could instantly monitor and analyze performance, discover compliance issues, and help us continually optimize and improve how we work.

But before we went all in on using Process Optimization throughout the enterprise, we had to see if it added measurable value. For two weeks, our analytics teams partnered with five ServiceNow employees and process owners to pilot Process Optimization within their daily operations.

We looked at five specific processes to see how they were operating in real-time and what we could do to improve individual steps within each cross-functional workflow.

    1. Incident management: Any time an incident is generated across ServiceNow IT services, whether it’s user created (reactive) or created through monitoring (proactive)

    2. Asset management: Whenever ServiceNow employees ask for something to be installed on their computers

    3. Problem management: Any time there is a problem recorded across ServiceNow, a problem record details the cause or potential cause of one or more incidents

    4. HR service delivery: Any time a ServiceNow employee has a question, needs a task completed, or needs help from HR

    5. Request management: Any time ServiceNow employees create requests across IT backend Infrastructure services

We knew that once we understood how each of these processes were being executed in reality (versus in theory), we could make the necessary adjustments to make each step run more smoothly.

These were our results using ServiceNow Process Optimization for two weeks:

Incident management

Inefficiencies:

• High CPU alerts consuming IT operations team bandwidth (automation opportunity)
• IT operations team manually triaging the micro-segmentation heartbeat failure INC
• Too many escalations from L1/L2 to L3 teams

Potential impact if improved:

• 28% faster
• 5% more productive

Asset management

Inefficacies:

• 22% of requests taking additional step, adding an average of three days to the resolution
• 30% of requests waiting for four days for approval; Only 2% of requests getting rejected by managers
• 22% of requests took 10 days for license allocation after approval

Potential impact if improved:

• 31% faster
• 12% more productive

Problem management

Inefficiencies:

• Delay in problem assessment by the problem coordinator
• Delay in closing the root cause analysis task by the task assignee
• Delay in starting the remediation task by the task assignee

Potential impact if improved:

• 40% faster
• 22% more productive

Request management

Inefficiencies:

• Delay in server access request fulfillment, requiring considerable manual effort
• High volume for active directory group lifecycle management
• Manual intervention required to fulfill server reboot request

Potential impact if improved:

• 25% faster
• 10% more productive

HR case management

Inefficiencies

• 74% of HR cases are recategorized
• 60% of the HR cases take longer than six days to resolve
• Case resolution is delayed, resulting in a lower employee NPS score

Potential impact if improved:

• 46% faster
• 34% more productive

Our in-platform Process Optimization product identified very specific opportunities for improvement within each workflow. Had we relied on manual process reviews, we may not have discovered the issues in the first place, and if we did, it would have taken significantly longer to uncover them and take action.

For future remedy, the process owner might dedicate more resources to that inefficient or slow step in the process. Or perhaps the step can be automated using ServiceNow Virtual Agent or Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

What’s next for us with process mining

We kicked off our journey to execute processes more efficiently by testing five ServiceNow processes, with hundreds more to follow across the company. We’re continuously using our own Process Optimization product to discover more opportunities to digitize and automate our operations and lower the amount of timeconsuming manual labor for our employees.

With all our process data on the Now Platform, there is potential to improve our company’s 900 processes across the entire organization.