Celonis EMS Process Explorer and Variant Explore: What’s the difference?

Celonis EMS provides multiple tools to analyze and optimize your business processes. Two powerful tools are the Variant Explorer and Process Explorer. Both show you how your processes actually function using objective event data gathered in real-time from your operational systems. These process x-rays, as we called them, show you where your processes are broken and with EMS you can fix them.

One Celonis user wanted to better understand Variant Explorer and Process Explorer. They reached out to the Celonis community through Celopeers and asked how the two tools were different. Celopeers community members jumped in with the answer and a way for the original poster to learn more.

Celopeers member asked how Celonis EMS Process Explorer and Variant Explorer are different

Variant Explorer shows all the different paths (or variants) a specific process takes within an organization. Process Explorer, on the other hand, does not show a specific process path (or variants) for a group of cases, but instead shows the most common activities and connections filtered on case frequency by default.

As this question is one of the most popular posts on Celopeers with over 1,000 views, I thought it would be helpful to provide a bit more information about Variant Explorer and Process Explorer and links to the Celonis Academy training courses for each one.

What is Celonis EMS Variant Explorer?

Variant Explorer is a Celonis EMS Analysis tool that helps you explore how a specific process flows through your organization.

If we think about a process as a road trip, each process variant would be a potential route. Each activity within a process would be a waypoint along a route, and the connections between activities are like the roads that connect the stops. And, each trip a person makes along a particular route would be a case.

Using Variant Explorer, you can see the individual activities within each process variant and the frequency of each variant (based on number of cases). You can also compare variants to each other and see metrics for individual variants, such as Activity Frequency and Throughput Time.

In short, Variant Explorer gives you a quick way to see whether most process cases follow an acceptable flow of activities or not and helps you develop your first analysis questions.

To learn more about Variant Explore, take the Celonis Academy course Use the Variant Explorer, from which the above video was taken. 

What is Celonis EMS Process Explorer?

Process Explorer is a Celonis EMS Analysis tool that helps you explore how process activities are connected. Instead of showing us specific process variants, it shows the most common activities and connections.

Using our road trip analogy again, Process Explorer isn’t showing the different routes (variants) that people actually took on a given trip (case). Process Explorer shows us which waypoints (activities) and roads (connections) are the most common along the journey.

Process Explorer is extremely useful for finding infrequent activities, which can be difficult to spot using Variant Explore as these rare activities may not appear in common variants.

To learn more about Variant Explore, take the Celonis Academy course Use the Process Explorer, from which the above video was taken. 

Learn process mining and execution management skills

Celonis Academy offers over 300 courses to help you learn the process mining, process management, and execution management skills that today’s employers are looking for…all online and all for free. For more information about the on-demand training courses and learning material available from Celonis, check out the following resources:

• Learn PQL with these free online courses from Celonis Academy

• Top online training courses for business and tech professionals from Celonis Academy

• These Celonis Digital Badges could be among the hottest new credentials for tech pros

• Process Mining: From Theory to Execution (free 10-hour, on-demand course developed by Celonis and the Process and Data Science (PADS) group)

• What is Task Mining? (free 4-min video introduction to task mining)

• Celopeers job market message board

If you want to help build the execution management and process mining systems that will be part of every enterprise IT toolkit, come work for Celonis!

Bill Detwiler

Editor, Technical Content & Ecosystem

Bill Detwiler is Editor for Technical Content and Ecosystem at Celonis. He is the former Editor in Chief of TechRepublic, where he hosted the Dynamic Developer podcast and Cracking Open, CNET’s popular online show. Bill is an award-winning journalist, who’s covered the tech industry for more than two decades. Prior his career in the software industry and tech media, he was an IT professional in the social research and energy industries.