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Developing Software and People at the Forefront of Innovation
Before Process Mining was an internationally known enterprise tool and operations’ must-have, Process Mining was known to the academic world as a bold research idea within business process management, using data science to approach management and operations’ problems. Along with Process Mining, Celonis also has roots in academia: The company began as a student project at the Technical University in Munich! You might say it’s in Celonis’ DNA to maintain a close relationship to the academic community.
Celonis and the academic Process Mining community both drive research in Process Mining and Data Science with the goal to eliminate process inefficiencies, thereby reducing the amount of wasted energy, time and resources and making the future even brighter. Process Mining creates a significant impact across many industries and processes, which has caused a surge of recent interest and recognition. But to leverage its full potential—improving every process in the world—there is still a long way to go.
As the market leader with the best-in-class technology, Celonis understands that this cannot be achieved by a one-way exchange. We need true cooperation between industry applications and research approaches. Therefore, the Celonis Development and Academic Alliance works at the forefront of research to engage and collaborate with the academic Process Mining community from joint research, to student and thesis projects, or simply conference participations and exchange workshops with the academic Process Mining community.
Celonis Development means being a Thought Leader - research projects & publications
Celonis partners in consortia with multiple universities and other industry partners to not only develop the next iteration of our product, but also to actively contribute to the progress of the field as a whole. For example, we maintain a close relationship with the University of Salzburg to develop Process Mining algorithms. Currently, the collaboration focuses on developing an algorithm which can cluster a high number of variants. Moreover, we are working on use cases in production and manufacturing, where Process Mining can be applied for prescriptive analytics and supply chain optimization. Because these projects are so relevant to our company, we actively initiate and coordinate some of these projects.
Furthermore, Celonis contributes to the research community via scientific publications by collaborating with professors nationally and internationally. One of our latest contributions is a chapter in “Process Querying Methods” in which we describe Celonis PQL, our novel programming language for processes and their analysis. Read more about our publications here.
We inspire and mentor the Next-Generation - Student Theses and Projects
We maintain a large network of academic partners within our Ecosystem Approach and closely collaborate not just with senior researchers, but also with students. In the first half of 2020 alone, we were involved in the support of approximately 50 bachelors’ and masters’ theses, at universities around the world. Anyone interested in writing their thesis on a topic related to Process Mining can sign up for free for the Celonis Thesis Program. We provide support through our academic license of the Celonis Intelligent Business Cloud, and help students get started in using the software to evaluate their own data. In some cases, we offer extended support such as access to Celonis’ experts.
Development works through Collaboration - Conferences & Exchange Workshops
Celonis is present at many high profile conferences like SIGMOD, C++ Con Berlin or the ICPM conference. Many of them were sponsored by Celonis. For example, the PQL Engine development team was present with a booth at the SIGMOD 2019 in Amsterdam. For ICPM, Celonis was even a platinum sponsor and hosted the very well received After-Party.
We regularly exchange with many experts of the academic communities for Process Mining and data processing. For example, we regularly discuss new trends in the Process Mining community with Prof. Will van der Aalst, which is known as the “Godfather of Process Mining”. Recently, we hosted an online workshop with Prof. Gregor Polančič from the University of Maribor and our own UI/UX team to exchange ideas on user experience design and intercultural differences in it. We are also in contact with the Database Chair of the TUM, where we provide insights to the research community about the challenges and trends our customers are facing.
The Celonis Engineering team is proud to be part of the Process Mining research community and to also carry a reputation as thought leaders in the field. Exchanging ideas with the academic Process Mining community gives us the opportunity to explore new challenges, room for growth and personal development, and makes developing a software product which is state-of-the-art a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
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