The Transformative Power Of Process Mining On EX

Innovation The Transformative Power Of Process Mining On EX Vijay Kotu Brand Contributor ServiceNow BRANDVOICE Storytelling and expertise from marketers | Paid Program Aug 17, 2022, 07:51pm EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Your employee pain points are probably resolvable—with process mining, you can find out where to start. Let’s start with a very basic question: What is mining? Coal mining is digging for coal in the ground. Bitcoin mining is introducing new bitcoins into cryptocurrency circulation.

Data mining is extracting patterns from large data sets. The common thread is discovery and extraction—the hunt for something valuable. Every process follows a pattern—but not all patterns are perfect.

getty In business, efficiency is one of the most valuable attributes. It can make the difference between meeting targets or not, getting to market before the competition or lagging, and having happy versus unhappy employees. Finding new efficiencies can be tricky, though.

And that’s where process mining enters the picture. How does process mining work? As organizations digitally transform, their number one challenge is to eliminate the inefficiencies and bottlenecks that hamper their processes. It’s called process improvement and it’s been around a long time.

Process mining goes a step further—it combines the discipline of process improvement with data mining and AI. The result is the ability to take a detailed look at each step of a process, from the starting blocks to the finish line. In essence, process mining gives organizations maps that show how processes get from point A to point B , so they can be audited and improved to better suit the people who utilize them.

A simple analogy In a city park, a landscape architect or urban designer creates a space and designates pathways people can use to move through it. They create a map (or, for our purposes, a process ). This photo shows you a city park with such a designed path.

How the designer thinks the path will be used. ServiceNow Sometimes, designers discover that people don’t use their preordained pathways as planned. Instead, they naturally gravitate toward a different route.

How the path is actually used. ServiceNow In this case, people use the steps as the designer had planned. After all, steps are easier to navigate than a steep hillside of grass and the railings provide a visual cue and physical support to guide park visitors along the designed route.

However, when people reach the bottom of the stairs, they face a decision: follow the concrete path, or cut across the grass so you get from point A to point B more directly. It’s evident in the picture that people choose the second option. The reason is simple enough: Humans, like cattle or ants, are wired to seek out efficiency.

Most organizations experience this same phenomenon. There’s a designed process. Then, there’s what actually happens.

Process mining gives organizations a snapshot of exactly how a process is being executed, day in and day out, in real-life conditions, with real employees, partners, and/or customers. Pain points and inefficiencies are illuminated. Leaders can use this information to improve the process with digitization, automation , and thoughtful redesign.

Process mining combines knowing and doing Process mining can be broken into two phases: Knowing: Finding the bottlenecks in the process, like when demand outweighs the supply of a particular good or the demand for work exceeds available resources. Doing : Performing the steps needed to remove bottlenecks and optimize the process, such as allocating more resources to one step of a process to match the actual demand. When you know exactly what’s happening behind the scenes, you can start doing.

This allows you to tackle specific challenge points head on to remove a bottleneck. You may need to add more resources to help complete this step in the process, or maybe the entire step itself can be automated using workflows. Been there, done that It’s extremely satisfying to use process mining to fix problems and drive value for your organization.

We know because we are doing it every day at ServiceNow. Using AI-powered analysis and process optimization, we’ve made big impacts across the company: HR service delivery: Because of discovered inefficiencies, 74% of submitted HR cases are being recategorized. Time to resolution is expected to improve by 31%, benefitting both our HR team and the employee experience.

Request management: Server access requests have been a pain point for us. Through process mining, we figured out bottlenecks and how to use AI to accelerate the process by 25%. Asset management : We found that 22% of employee software requests required an extra step that took three days.

To eliminate delays, create a better experience, and increase productivity, we created a new process that’s expected to increase efficiency by 31%. Stories like these prove that process mining may not be that different from physical mining—outcomes like these are as good as gold. Whatever the solution may be, discovery and continuous improvement give an organization the ability to openly identify patterns of inefficiency and immediately take corrective action.

And when you start to regularly mine your company’s processes across each department, you’ll be able to use machine learning to improve results, get recommendations on what to automate, and elevate overall service delivery. As processes throughout your company begin to reflect the actual flow of work versus a designed flow, employees can stop using shortcuts and devote their time to completing the actual task at hand. The result: an organization well on its way to a true digital transformation, one process at a time.

To learn more about how we’re using process mining within ServiceNow, be sure to read the white paper, Now on Now: How we’re using in-platform process mining to make ServiceNow an intelligent enterprise. Vijay Kotu Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions.