Much of a company’s daily operations consist of set processes, defined as a series of actions that have a beginning and an end. Examples include accounts payable and receivable, procurement and inventory management.

Nowadays these business functions are heavily automated in many organizations. Computer systems log every step taken, every second of every day. These logs and the data they contain are the raw materials that Celonis and other process miners analyze to provide real-time monitoring of a company’s operations.

Process mining creates interactive dashboards that map operations, pinpoint errors or exceptions, and show how to correct and prevent them in the future. The system continues to run after the initial scan, parsing individual processes and making suggestions to achieve ever-greater efficiencies.

Process mining could revolutionize what until now has been a largely subjective field dominated by management consultants, replacing them with automated, dynamic systems that anyone can use. “In a few hours you see the workflows and where the friction points are,” says Rinke. “You get a way higher quality picture, faster. It’s automated, it has endless resolution, and there’s no politics.”

Celonis isn’t the only company doing process mining, but it was one of the earliest to get started and is ahead of the competition, according to Daniel Johnson, director of automation at Future WorkForce, a British-Romanian firm that specializes in helping companies adopt machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies, including Celonis’s EMS.

“The value and power of something like Celonis, from my point of view, is that it allows operations teams to actually understand what’s happening within their business processes day-to-day,” says Johnson. “And then where their processes are inefficient, giving them data to make decisions about how they can improve those processes to reduce costs or operations, delight their customers, or increase revenue.”

One customer who has seen a big improvement is German automaker BMW. The company decided to start slowly, collaborating with Celonis to focus on one process in one area: to reduce the amount spent on paint in one factory. After a successful result, BMW now uses Celonis to monitor 50 different processes, which affects 80% of the carmaker’s manufacturing footprint, according to Rinke.