In the beginning there was a mistake, a huge mistake. In the 1990s, Wil van der Aalst, mathematician at the Technical University of Eindhoven, was firmly convinced that one had to be able to model the work processes in companies into a kind of ideal. And if you behaved that way, there would be great gains in efficiency. The economy was very interested, software was developed and also bought for it. “But it was never really used,” van der Aalst finally discovered, “many projects have failed.”
He eventually developed a new method – one that is now being used successfully in many companies around the world. The Munich-based company Celonis, which is now valued at more than ten billion dollars, is the market leader in so-called process mining. Van der Aalst, 55, has decided to work there as Chief Scientist in the future, in addition to his work as a professor in Aachen.
The idea of process mining was brought about by a really simple scientific question: If reality does not stick to the processes that people think up, can one derive something from the processes themselves? And whether, as soon became apparent. Processes in companies leave traces in computer systems, for example that of SAP. “These are always tables with columns full of dates and time stamps,” says van der Aalst. This data would be used to derive the actual flow of processes.
“People always think processes are complicated”
How is the process, what happens frequently, what takes a long time – with questions like these, very simple data can be derived, and they ultimately lead to a model that shows how the processes in companies really run and where there are problems. “People are often amazed that you can show things that are new to the people who work with these processes on a daily basis.”
Most of the processes in companies are actually simple. “People always think processes are complicated,” says the mathematician, “but 80 percent are actually simple.” The complexity lies in the remaining 20 percent, “which causes 80 percent of the problems”. With his method, bottlenecks can be identified. “The reasons are clear,” says van der Aalst, “that enables predictions.” The Celonis company, which came across the process mining developed by him by chance, played an important role in this. You convert the knowledge thus discovered into actions.
Wil van der Aalst, who started his scientific career in Eindhoven, now teaches at RWTH Aachen University. “I have always done research, but I am also enthusiastic about founding people for it,” he says of himself. He always wanted to remain independent, even if he supported many companies. “But something has changed,” he says. For a long time, research had a head start on the companies that use his technology. Now, however, companies like Celonis have also developed automated actions to catch bottlenecks in processes from the outset.
Because there are many questions that can only be answered if you use the technology on a daily basis, he decided to join a company. The choice fell on Celonis because the Munich company controls 60 to 70 percent of the market. “I hope that I will have more influence on the fact that developments from research are incorporated into the software.” Celonis is a very interesting company, “Germany can be proud of it,” says van der Aalst, Germany and the Netherlands are leaders in process mining.
With van der Aalst, Celonis not only wins the doyen of the discipline, a Celonis research center is also to be set up at the University of Aachen – a good measure against the shortage of skilled workers in the industry.