Germany's highest rated start-up, the Munich software company Celonis, is introducing a new generation of its "Process Mining" software.

The new offerings are intended to enable an even deeper analysis of business processes and a better understanding of the connections between different processes, Celonis announced at its "Celosphere" user fair in Munich.

Maximilian Sachsen

Editor in Business

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Process mining is currently one of the biggest trends in the IT industry, which is not exactly lacking in trends.

The technology can be compared to an X-ray machine for corporate IT.

A software evaluates countless data, numbers and tables of a company.

Time information is usually stored behind this data.

From this, the software creates the digital image of a business process, for example sales or logistics.

This digital flowchart shows where there are bottlenecks, deviations or delays.

Founded in 2011, Celonis is the highest rated vendor of such software.

Investors recently valued the company at $13 billion.

Now the company is developing its offer further.

Instead of only examining individual processes as before, "Process Sphere" makes it possible to show different business processes and their interactions at a glance.

Business processes "do not take place in silos"

If, for example, inefficiencies in purchasing also result in delays in sales, this is now recognizable, advertises co-boss and co-founder Alex Rinke in an interview with the FAZ "Different business processes do not take place in silos." Users can now view all company processes can be visualized at once and how long a certain product takes from purchase to sale can be displayed - and how it can be done faster.

"It's like Google Maps for company processes," says Rinke.

"You can also look at the whole world or just zoom in on individual cities or districts."

Will van der Aalst considers the innovation to be the "biggest step in process mining in years".

The Dutch computer scientist is the inventor of Process Mining and laid the theoretical foundations for the technology back in the 1990s.

Van der Aalst is now chief scientist at Celonis.

Process mining has so far been considered complex in its application and was more reserved for IT specialists.

With "Business Miner", the second innovation presented, Celonis wants to change that.

"We wanted to make the findings from our software accessible to normal employees," says Rinke.

It works like this: Employees can ask questions about business processes in a mask and receive the information that the Celonis software has about them at a glance.

The program also provides a suggestion as to how the relevant work step could be made more efficient.

Rinke reports that there are hundreds of questions to choose from.

Some relate to specific processes, others apply to any process.

Docked to "Business Miner" is also a kind of office chat,

With the innovations, Celonis wants to grow even more.

Process mining is considered an anti-cyclical business because companies want to reduce their costs, especially in months of crisis.

In view of inflation and skyrocketing energy prices, there really is no shortage of crises at the moment - this should further boost Celonis' sales.