The advent of Process Mining is changing the landscape of business management, the success of Process Mining companies such as Celonis serve as a blueprint for the businesses and consultants of the future.
Two decades ago, the mechanisms to monitor a business’s processes were two-fold; employee interviews, and backlogs of data that sat in computers- laborious to trawl through and organise. This has all changed with the advent of process mining. Objective data is pulled from a business’s event logs and automated to create a digital twin wherein every process variation is readily available to view; from purchase-to-pay to accounts payable data, the processes are digitised and display Conformance statistics and KPIs automatically.
This transformation of data that previously sat in I.T. logs has rendered Process Mining to be a veritable goldmine for businesses in identifying inefficiencies. The lion’s share of the market belongs to Celonis, a fairly new start-up that only celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2020, and yet is the second most valuable start-up in Europe, with recent valuations rendering Celonis an $11 billion decacorn.
In an interview with a Munich-based Celonis Digital Consulting Analyst, Moritz Knopp, it became clear to me how Celonis gained its coveted decacorn status; the use of data to glean an understanding of a company’s internal processes, instead of traditional methods used by consultants such as worker interviews, virtually eliminates cause for human error. The process data is objective, and Celonis’s rise and continuing upward trajectory reflect its ethos; to cull inefficiencies.
Celonis is Germany’s most valuable start-up, how has process mining been received in the sphere of business consultancy?
The reception of process mining technology is reflected in the success of Celonis. By digitising processes, it is much easier to identify inefficiencies within a company or an institution. Process Mining has been adopted by roughly half of the Fortune 500 companies, and Celonis has outpaced all of its competitors because of the innovative software. In Germany, there are a lot of small process mining vendors and yet Celonis still holds 90% of the process mining market share. You want to tackle every company, every company with process inefficiencies is losing money, that is why Celonis is so successful in the market- everybody needs process mining.
The success of Celonis ultimately stems from advancing a data-process niche in the market, however, with the growth of several small process mining vendors in the last few years this niche is expanding; how is Celonis staying relevant with current innovation?
Last year, Celonis turned ten, but they did more commercial impacts and tried to accelerate three years ago. Celonis has outpaced all of its competitors. To evolve from the niche of process mining, Celonis launched their own execution management system.
Is Celonis seeking to expand globally in its capabilities as well as technologically?
The focus of company expansion is very much global. Celonis has 17+ offices globally. Our headquarters are in Munich as well as New York City.
Finally, Celonis is attracting the best talent in every part of its operations- from Engineering to Corporate, in 17 locations around the world- what does Celonis look for in new hires?
I believe a few elements make a candidate stand out when going through the hiring process- customer value being one of them. Of course, being a data enthusiast is a given, having a real passion for the work but the important things are to be authentic, to be motivated, and have a passion for technology and bringing the best solutions to the client. For a young start-up like Celonis; having an innovative, solutions-oriented outlook is essential, so you have to enjoy being a problem solver and embrace challenges.
As start-up enterprises gain more traction financially; they have increasingly attracted the most capable graduates who are opting for a more dynamic business environment than established companies. To this end, Celonis has launched their Academic Alliance programme wherein they are partnering with 250 academic institutions globally to “encourage the Process Miners of tomorrow”. As automation increasingly permeates every sector of industrial society, Celonis’s “Academic Process Mining Community” provides students with the opportunity to learn the basics of process mining software and use the Celonis EMS. The academic platform provides 9 different training tracks which are tailored to the user’s needs.
Having virtually taken part in the UCL-Celonis Masterclass in Data-Driven Management over the course of three weeks, process mining no longer seemed to be a niche reserved for data analysts but the future of business management. The Masterclass involved independent navigation of software that the cohort was scant familiar with; having been tasked with inputting raw data from a business case study into the Celonis process mining software and interacting with the interface that displayed every process variation. Despite this, the software and training tracks provided by Celonis could be skilfully manoeuvred by anybody currently at an academic institution- no matter their degree discipline.
For those interested in exploring this exciting technological niche; Celonis is launching its Masterclasses in November 2021.
