To this end, it makes sense to first take a look at Process Analytics Factory and its product, the process mining software PAFnow. The company was founded in 2014 by Tobias Rother. Rother had already gained experience in the process mining market as COO and co-founder of the start-up Process Gold. After this was taken over by UI Path, he was able to concentrate fully on his new company PAF. Over the last eight years, PAF has developed into a relevant player in the process mining market. At last count, the process mining factory employed around 40 people, divided between the headquarters in Darmstadt and a branch office in Michigan (USA).
According to their own statements, the mission of these 40 employees is to revolutionise and democratise process mining. This goal is to be achieved by means of the in-house process mining software PAFnow. PAFnow has so far been one of the challengers to the top dogs Celonis, Software AG and UIPath. However, the software pursues an interesting approach, which has already convinced renowned customers such as MAN, Merck and Daimler.
PAFnow says it uses process mining "where it belongs". Namely, in the existing business intelligence infrastructure of the customer companies - where the customers are already working. Process Mining is embedded in Microsoft Power BI, implemented in Microsoft Power Platform and integrated in Microsoft 365. For Power BI users, the use of PAFnow is also free of charge, which cleverly circumvents the usage hurdle of complicated purchasing processes.
By this one-sided focus on Microsoft users, PAF seems to limit itself unnecessarily. However, in view of the fact that 260,000 companies worldwide and 97% of the Fortune 500 are Microsoft customers, this supposed restriction sounds more like a clever focus. And this cleverness did not go unnoticed by the decision-makers at Celonis, who want to expand into precisely this market with the combination of their own EMS and PAFnow. For a long time, Celonis itself had a close relationship with SAP, which the acquisition has now finally shaken off. The acquisition should improve the accessibility of Celonis EMS for Microsoft users enormously. The number of users of Power Platform front-ends in customer companies is many times higher than the number of specialists who work directly in Celonis' execution management software.
But this aspect is not only important for Celonis. There is also a strong user experience for the users of PAFnow. The users appreciate the possibility of native integration into Power BI and Power Platform, which enables a rapid deployment of the software. In this way, a combination of BI and process mining can be realised in a very short time, which also enables the creation of BI dashboards. This is advantageous because the majority of customers are interested in simple KPIs and insights. If problems are identified, a more in-depth analysis can be carried out quickly. This is then presented on different report pages, which we will now take a closer look at.
The discovery page is the centre and starting point of an analysis. It offers a view of each variant of the analysed process before a deeper insight can be initiated. This can be done, for example, on the Variants Page. On this page, individual paths of the process flow can be viewed and evaluated with regard to their performance. The Process Steps page can then be used to investigate why certain steps are completed in one process and not in another.
Further information can be provided by the monitoring page, where the most important KPIs are displayed. Trends and developments can be derived from these. With the difference analysis, on the other hand, different process variants, for example from different company units, can be compared with regard to various criteria. This analysis step can be supplemented by benchmarking on the page of the same name. This contains various KPIs that allow a superficial understanding of the performance of the process variants. The more detailed process analysis can then be carried out in the Process Explorer.
With the Lead Time Page, lead times of different process variants and cases can be viewed and analysed. With the help of the Process Explorer, causes for delays can then be identified. One of these causes can be inefficient repeat loops in the real process, for example, which can be analysed using the Loops Page. It is also possible to identify the causes of the undesirable inefficiencies by means of statistical correlation. A further look at inefficiencies can be taken via the conformity check. Here PAFnow enables the comparison of the actual process with the target process. This can be generated either by drag-and-drop or automatically. Automation is also the keyword for the Automation Page. It can be used to analyse the extent to which the processes under consideration are automated and how the automation influences performance.
In addition to analysing performance and efficiency, compliance analysis can also be used to look at adherence to guidelines and requirements. The individual process step sequences and the users who carry them out can be examined. Furthermore, it can be checked for correctness and differentiate between user types such as people, robots or systems.
This range of functions is already quite respectable, even if it cannot completely keep up with the big names in the process mining market. Especially in the area of process automation, other providers are already further ahead. However, it is foreseeable that all functions of the Celonis EMS will soon be available for PAFnow users.
Celonis' acquisition is therefore not simply about making a competitor harmless. It is rather a bundling of the respective strengths that benefits both the company and the customers. This is also reflected in the fact that the 40 employees of PAFnow will in future strengthen the development of solutions for the Microsoft Power Platform at Celonis. For example, PAF's CTO Timo Nolle will in future lead the development of product integration in Microsoft Power BI. His colleague and CEO Tobias Rother will in future be responsible for both the expansion of the Microsoft Centre of Excellence and all Microsoft Power BI topics within Celonis. Nolle and Roth will also work, for example, on enabling customers to seamlessly integrate the Celonis EMS with Microsoft Power BI reports, collaborate with Microsoft Teams and trigger flows in Microsoft Power Automate.
In the future, the entire Celonis portfolio will be available to PAFnow users. Especially in the area of process optimisation, a large increase in functions is to be expected here. For example, artificial intelligence can be used to automatically predict the violation of KPIs and to report them preventively. Furthermore, Celonis enables the running of multiple simulations, what-if analyses and scenario tests to illuminate different future situations. Furthermore, comparative analyses can be carried out more easily, as virtual logs of the simulated processes can be saved.
In addition, the Celonis Execution Management system can automatically identify processes and tasks that are suitable for automation. These can then directly optimise processes and close execution gaps in the source systems under consideration. For this purpose, Celonis uses a repertoire of over 10,000 automations from more than 700 execution apps, which can be easily created by drag-and-drop. This repertoire is continuously supplemented and expanded, also by third-party providers.
In addition to the benefits for Celonis, PAF and their users, the collaboration also gives an indication of Celonis' longer-term strategy. It does not only want to win new users for process mining, but via SAP, ServiceNow and now also Microsoft, to get closer to where the actual work of the customers takes place. In doing so, Celonis wants to become a kind of "intelligent layer" below the central technology platforms for companies, which goes beyond the mere extraction of static data and insights.
In addition, Celonis seems to be moving more and more from being positioned as a provider of pure process intelligence, to a provider of automation solutions. This allows the benefits of an end-to-end provider to be realised. Here, Celonis can act as a kind of X-ray machine that can capture process variations and problems and organise operational telemetry data. The key point here is that valuable insights are created rather than piling up huge mountains of data. Building on this, workflows are then created and realised through automations.
On this basis, Celonis has established itself as the leading multi-environment process intelligence platform. Future growth is likely to be very different from what we have seen so far, which has been primarily about tight integration with the major enterprise software vendors. The next "big thing" lies in demonstrating actionable insights and realising them through automation. With the acquisition of PAF, Celonis has just added another ecosystem in which to do just that.
