The Essex MBA: Finding insights through process mining

"Digital transformation" is a key buzzword in business today, but how do business leaders utilise digital transformation and new technologies to create real value for an organisation and improve customer experience? For many organisations, the ‘precious gems’ of insights are already in their IT systems but are too often hidden among gigabytes of data. Let’s go mining for those precious insights! 

Sustainable Operations

As part of the ‘Sustainable Operations’ module on The Essex MBA, students discovered the value created for organisations by looking at business processes through the ‘digital magnifier’ of process mining, enabled by a powerful data analysis engine. The engine in this example was Celonis, the global leader in execution management.  

As part of the ‘Sustainable Operations’ module on The Essex MBA, students discovered the value created for organisations by looking at business processes through the ‘digital magnifier’ of process mining, enabled by a powerful data analysis engine. The engine in this example was Celonis, the global leader in execution management. 

Celonis defines process mining as “an analytical discipline for discovering, monitoring, and improving processes as they actually are and not as you think they might be.”

To explore the relationship between technology and operations management our MBA students participated in a workshop where they used the Celonis Execution Management System to activate a standard Purchase-to-Pay process using real data from a multinational organisation. Our students were amazed to discover that there were 665 variations on the system for this one standard process. The higher the number of variations, the less streamlined the process which means that there is a higher potential for wasted spending, poor customer experience and poor supply chain management.

Process mining in this way means that a business manager has the tools to analyse data, address wasteful variations and explore improvements based upon the detailed drill-down capabilities of the system.

MBA Student Feedback

"This was a brief but enriching session that added another layer of knowledge to operational, technological capability available to support some of the market challenges. The introduction to Celonis triggered further appetite to understand the art of process mining and mapping." - Altin B, MBA 2022

"Thanks for arranging the session, Marco. It was really interesting and an incredible piece of software. I definitely will take the qualification you mentioned." – Robert S, MBA 2022

Essex MBA students will be able to build on this introduction workshop and continue their learning experience through the student account at Celonis and can even receive certification as Celonis Process Expert, a real plus for their CVs.

About Celonis

Celonis got its start when its founders looked to incorporate a then somewhat obscure method of scanning IT log data to map out a company’s processes, called process mining, into their student consulting work. They then developed software to automatically X-ray process problems, and within a few minutes provide an accurate snapshot of an individual process, complete with its inefficiencies and chokepoints, as well as information on where they came from.

Today Celonis has more than 2,100 global employees and is leveraging this foundation to pioneer the execution management industry and change business processes. Thousands of organisations have adopted Celonis including Fortune 500 companies such as Dell, Kimberly-Clark, L’Oréal, or Pfizer, and Celonis is growing by triple digits year-over-year.