Why now is the time to reinvent process mining

Eleven years ago, almost nobody in the world had heard of process mining. Basti, Martin, and I were still students, and Professor Wil van der Aalst and his colleagues at the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining had just written The Process Mining Manifesto - one of many papers that ultimately earned Wil the moniker ‘godfather of process mining’.

I would only meet Wil a few years later, but little did he know that two of the papers he wrote in the early 2000s would inspire Basti, Martin and me to start Celonis.

So we spent the next six years knocking on the doors of Germany’s industrial giants, spreading the word, building our customer base, pouring every penny back into our company so we could deliver more value to more companies.?

In a way, back then it was a simpler time. Aside from dealing with the fallout of the financial crisis, business ran as business had always run. Which was one of the reasons process mining was so valuable. It was game changing to see how ‘this is how we’ve always done it’ was harming organizations.?

Our customers all tell us: You never forget the first time you see your process X-ray. The ‘a-ha moment’. When you first understand how your processes actually run.?

Personally, I will never forget the first time I saw a customer have one of these moments. There are many firsts I will never forget. The first Celonaut, the first Celosphere, the first time a customer realized $1M in value.?

I’m fortunate enough to say each of those things were just the first of many. As the years went by our customers realized billions in value, and thousands of businesses joined our community.?

With each event, each new customer using Celonis, the community got stronger and our solution became better.?

One day it wasn’t sufficient anymore to show our customers what’s really going on in their organizations; now they also wanted us to fix the problems our software had identified. And that’s when we invented the Celonis Execution Management System. All these years of gaining insights percolated down into a single system that could help any organization reveal and fix hidden inefficiencies, so they could perform at levels they never thought possible.

It’s gratifying to see how our customers are now leveraging the Execution Management System as an essential part of running an effective organization.?

But times have changed. Today our customers are weathering the pandemic, supply chain disruptions, inflation — and the climate crisis is on all our minds. The unpredictable macroeconomic headwinds keep coming, and the nice-to-have of greater visibility, agility, and control has become a must-have.?

Once again we listened closely to what our customers told us. A greater perspective is needed. Organizations need a way to see the interconnectedness of things. How pulling a lever for the bottom line in one place would affect the green line somewhere else. But delivering on that is easier said than done.

In order to solve the unsolvable, we knew we had to connect the unconnected. It was time to reimagine the future of business execution. And the first step was to reinvent process mining.?

That’s why at Celosphere 2022 we’ve just unveiled a step-change in process mining. There’s a lot to unpack, but here I’ll share the two most significant game-changers.?

First up is Process Sphere?

Up until now, process mining has always been limited to looking at individual processes in isolation. It gave you invaluable insight, but it flattened things out to get there.

With Process Sphere, Celonis has reinvented process mining. Object-centric process mining allows us to look at all of a company's processes in a single canvas. Simply put, we are moving from 2-dimensional static views of our processes and organizations to a 3-dimensional, dynamic view. The X-ray has become an MRI.? And it’s game-changing.?

This creates a revolutionary new perspective on your business. It is more precise, more powerful and gives us deeper insights way faster. And after two days of conversations about Process Sphere with our best customers and partners, I think we are still just waking up to the potential Process Sphere will unlock.

Next is Business Miner??

Where Process Sphere reinvents the core of process mining, Business Miner reinvents the experience of process mining.

In every organization there are hundreds, if not thousands of people who want to make processes better — whether they have ‘process’ in their title or not — and we knew we had to find a way of putting the power of process mining in their hands.?

While many capabilities leveraging process mining target the expert user, Business Miner enables everyone, putting process mining at their fingertips. You don’t even need to know what a process is to benefit from Business Miner. Celonis guides the user to insights using a question-and-answer system, and the user has the ability to share those insights discovered and collaborate easily across the organization.

The new ‘a-ha’

Eleven years ago we pioneered the process mining category when we first developed the ability to automatically X-ray processes and find inefficiencies. Now, with the way we are reinventing process mining, customers can see both the process-bones of the famous Celonis X-ray and all of the interrelated process-MRI elements that give the full business perspective.?

So you see how to optimize for bottom line, top line, and green line all at the same time. So every person in your organization can put their weight to the wheel. So together, we can all change the world, one process at a time.

We know this is a game of inches. But every process counts. Every action counts.?

Now is the time for the visionaries, the change makers, the North Stars.?

Now is the time to take action.

Now is the time to look up.

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