Key concepts around process mining

With Solutions Powered by the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform

What is process mining?

Process mining started out as an academic theory over a decade ago. Today, it’s a well-established business technology, used by thousands of organizations around the world, with hundreds more starting every day.

Process mining gives you an in-depth look at your business processes.

Forget the subjective, imprecise, static impression of your processes that you get from process mapping workshops. Process mining provides an objective, live, virtual representation of your organization’s processes.

Professor Wil van der Aalst, Celonis Chief Scientist and widely considered the godfather of process mining, describes it as: “The bridge between data science [which includes algorithms, machine learning, data mining, and predictive analytics] and process science [which covers operations management and research, business process improvement and management, process automation, workflow management, and optimization].”

Process mining is widely recognized – by enterprises, analysts, and the media – as the best way to understand your business processes. Since 2023, process mining has had its own Gartner® Magic Quadrant™, validating its importance. In fact, process mining is currently used by 39% of businesses, with a further 52% planning to adopt it in the next 12 months, according to the 2025 Process Optimization Report.

The rise of AI has seen process mining come into its element once again. By extracting and standardizing business data, process mining can provide AI with the context it needs to succeed. Then AI can make smart decisions that are tailored to the business, aligned with its goals, and deliver greater ROI. By helping businesses understand how their operations run, process mining allows them to make their operations work with solutions like AI.

Explore more about the background to process mining and why it matters →

Why is process mining important?

Change has changed. It’s got a whole lot faster.

Boardrooms are managing fragile supply chains, looming tariffs, and constant cost pressures. Your people are stretched thin. The only thing that’s stayed the same is the expectation to deliver on your goals.

Enterprise AI is set to reinvent operations and augment your workforce to achieve the results you need. But most companies haven’t seen their AI initiatives deliver on their full potential yet.

What’s missing is a shared understanding of how your business runs and how to make it run better – so your people, AI, and an entire ecosystem of solution providers can work effectively towards your goals.

But that’s easier said than done because of a great disconnect at the heart of most enterprises. Departments speak their own language and systems don’t play well together, making it difficult to know what’s happening and how to improve it. So transformation becomes painful, productivity is low, and value is lost.

This is why process mining is important: Using process mining, enterprises can see how their processes run, and get recommendations for how to improve them.

Global process mining software revenue grew by more than 30% in 2024 alone, according to Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant for Process Mining Platforms. And process mining is paving the way for autonomous, agentic enterprises. Data that AI solutions need to be effective lives in the systems that underpin enterprise processes. Using process mining, enterprises can extract and transform that data to give AI the business context it needs to work.

Companies are going one step further by embracing a more comprehensive process intelligence platform to empower their people, partners, and AI to build intelligent solutions that continuously improve operations. Not just by fixing problems but by preventing them altogether.

Learn more about process intelligence →

What business problems does process mining solve?

Solving business problems like controlling costs, boosting productivity, and improving customer experience all comes down to visibility.

Imagine, for example, a manufacturer needs to improve margins. They’re unlikely to be able to control the price of essential raw materials. But if they know how production processes run, they can control and reduce costs by eliminating waste, minimizing downtime, or automating process steps.

The problem is that companies lack this organization-wide visibility – and even if they do have some, they’re unsure what to do with it. Process mining drives business value by helping businesses understand how their processes and operations run, so they can make them work. Along the way, process mining provides companies with the insights they need to orchestrate and measure their process improvement initiatives.

AI also cannot work for the enterprise if it cannot understand the context of the business, how it runs today, and how leaders want it to work tomorrow. So process mining has only become more important in the Agentic Age, where teams want to make AI work with their systems, solutions, and people.

Process mining solves business problems by enabling you to:

• Get complete visibility over your processes: With an objective, real-time, system-agnostic view of your processes, based on the data in your systems of record.
• Quantify the impact of process improvement: Demonstrate measurable value before and after implementing a process optimization, incentivizing further investment.
• Increase stakeholder alignment: Make data-driven strategic suggestions, complete with expected ROI, driving stakeholder buy-in and alignment.
• Prioritize transformation initiatives effectively: Quantify potential value so you can direct energy and resources to the most impactful business areas.
• Accelerate time to value: Celonis process mining is easy to implement and can deliver results in weeks, targeting proven areas of quick wins.
• Make enterprise AI work: Give AI the data and context it needs to know how the business runs, empowering it to autonomously make smart decisions that produce value.

Check out examples of process mining in practice →

What are common process mining use cases?

Process mining use cases are almost infinite, given that the technology cuts across multiple business functions and industries.

Any function can be made more efficient through this technology. But if you’re looking for inspiration about where to start with process mining in your organization, here are some common process mining use cases:

• Process mining for Enterprise AI: Identifying where automation will have the greatest process improvement impact, while orchestrating AI deployments and feeding them the context they need to understand how the business runs.
• Process mining for System Migration and Enterprise Modernization: De-risking and accelerating all phases of modernization and migration journeys by uncovering how applications and systems are actually used, and how they can be improved.
• Process mining for Supply Chain: Increasing supply chain resilience and agility by highlighting weak points and vulnerabilities like underperforming suppliers or slow-moving inventory.
• Process mining for Finance and Shared Services: Accelerating Finance transformation and cash flow through more efficient payment processing with minimized duplicate payments or missed revenue.
• Process mining for Sustainability and ESG: Reducing shipping emissions and driving sustainable spend management, as well as uncovering causes of recurring waste and unnecessary rework.
• Process mining for Customer Experience: Connect siloed processes between marketing, sales, services, and commerce teams for improved customer outcomes and optimized costs.

These use cases are applicable to many of the world’s largest industries, including Automotive, Banking, CPG, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, Manufacturing, the Public Sector, Professional Services, Retail, Telco and Media, Life Sciences, Pharma, and Transportation.

Explore our solution pages to dive deeper into how process mining can benefit your department or transformation initiative →

How does process mining work?

Every step of a business process leaves a digital footprint – event log data – in your transactional systems. Process mining hoovers up this trail of breadcrumbs to help you visualize what your processes look like across systems – bottlenecks, deviations, unnecessary duplicate steps, and the rest.

Process mining works in three steps:

• Step 1: First, process mining software extracts event log data from your informational systems.
• Step 2: Then process mining uses that event log data to produce an end-to-end visualization of the process, also known as a digital twin.
• Step 3: You’re then ready to find, simulate, and execute on opportunities for business value.

Of course, some process steps don’t take place in a transactional system, such as sending an email or opening a spreadsheet. But there’s a technology for that, too. Task mining collects desktop data which, when combined with process mining, can give an even more granular view of how work gets done and how processes run within an organization.

How has process mining evolved?

Process mining’s capabilities keep expanding. With each small step and giant leap, process mining creates new ways for businesses to understand their processes and operations, and make them work.

Traditional process mining has always been a powerful technology for observing business processes in real time. But its various evolutionary leaps have expanded its reach across businesses’ process landscape, and upgraded its ability to enhance the process data it extracts.

Business processes and operations rarely run in isolation. So along came object-centric process mining (OCPM), unlocking a more dynamic, 3D view of end-to-end business operations. Businesses can use OCPM to understand how processes interconnect across departments and workflows (think Procurement’s impact on production, for example).

The beauty is, as long as you choose a provider whose technology is system-agnostic, you can use process mining for any system in your tech stack.

In recent years, AI has made process mining more sophisticated by enriching data with business rules, benchmarks, and KPIs. This makes process mining data more meaningful and actionable, as AI-enhanced process mining can make improvement recommendations based on these insights. All before you make the data work harder for you with a process intelligence solution like the Celonis Platform.

It’s not just enterprises taking advantage of process mining. Consulting firms are also getting in on the action. Process mining allows consultants to shift away from generalist advisory work to specialized expertise. And the technology means they can finally leave behind time-consuming, resource-intensive, manual process-mapping sessions and workshops. They’re now able to supercharge client AI initiatives, drive business transformation with confidence, and scale value fast.

Check out a more detailed breakdown of how process mining works →

What are the benefits of process mining?

Process mining can kickstart businesses’ process improvement journey, unlock value in key revenue driving processes, scale that value across the enterprise, and help AI initiatives deliver ROI.

So why is process mining better than other process improvement methods? Here are the advantages of using process mining:

• Objective, fact-based insights: With insights derived from actual data, process mining allows you to audit, analyze, and improve your existing business processes more effectively and reliably.
• Faster, cheaper, and more accurate process improvement: Process mining is dramatically more efficient and more cost-effective than lengthy, subjective process mapping workshops.
• No rip and replace required: By working on top of your existing systems, process mining minimizes operational disruption and helps your existing tech stack work more harmoniously.
• Measurable performance: Businesses can check that process improvement initiatives have achieved the desired outcomes, or if further process optimization is required, thanks to the visibility of process mining.

Process mining success stories

Here are just a few success stories showcasing how real organizations are putting process mining to work:

• PepsiCo uses Celonis process mining to tackle organizational silos, a complex billing process, and difficulties prioritizing in Accounts Receivable.
• Florida Crystals successfully steered their S/4HANA transformation, slashed duplicate payments, and unlocked millions within a matter of months.
• State of Oklahoma gains transparency across their Procurement process, cutting maverick spend and slashing audit cycle times by 64 days.
• AstraZeneca optimizes Inventory Management, accelerating product delivery and streamlining data collection with OCPM.
• Ingka Group tracks millions of Order-to-Cash process variants and every event in their Sales Order process, minimizing imperfections.

Your business could be next in the process mining hall of fame. Join these companies by getting started with process mining for free →

When to use process mining

Does your organization have lots of systems, processes, and data? Does it want to make those systems and processes work harder, and get more value out of that data? Then you sound like an ideal candidate for process mining.

It’s never too early (or too late) to start using process mining in your business. And you don’t have to be suffering from recurring service issues and operational failures to benefit. Process mining can enhance processes and operations that are already effective.

Process mining can be especially useful if your business is:

• Harnessing new technologies like AI
• Merging, partnering, or integrating with another business
• Migrating systems or modernizing your tech stack
• Searching for new ways to generate value
• Strengthening sustainability measures
• Tightening up compliance programs
• Transforming Shared Services
• Improving Finance and Operations processes
• Building resiliency within your supply chain
• Boosting productivity and efficiency within your workforce

Read more applications of process mining →

How to find the right process mining solution

To get started with process mining, you first need to find the perfect partner. As the pioneers of process mining, we’ve helped many companies begin their journey toward operational excellence with successful proof-of-value projects – and then helped scale value with further process mining implementations.

That’s why we’ve poured our years of experience into the Buyer’s Guide for Process Mining. It’s a go-to resource for any business considering process mining, especially when evaluating different vendors. Inside you’ll find helpful resources like a process maturity assessment, a list of features you should ask process mining vendors about, and a template for your process mining RFP or RFI.

Start your process mining journey with our free buyer’s guide →

Process mining FAQs

What is a process?

A process can be defined as a series of actions or steps repeated in a progression from a defined or recognized 'start' to a defined or recognized 'finish'. The purpose of a process is to establish and maintain a commonly understood flow that allows a task to be completed efficiently and consistently.

Famous faces in the business process world include Order-to-Cash (O2C) and Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) at the macro-process level, alongside micro-processes like Claims Handling and Invoice Processing.

What’s the difference between process mining, object-centric process mining, and process intelligence?

Case-centric process mining helps visualize the flow of a single business process, making it useful for analyzing whether the right (or most effective) sequence of steps is occurring. Object-centric process mining (OCPM) offers a multi-process perspective by looking at the relationships between objects (such as a customer, order, or invoice) and events (a customer placing an order, or the payment of an invoice). This creates a more detailed view of how processes in the organization interconnect and interact, including downstream impact.

Process mining plays a vital part in process intelligence, which refers to the combination of system data, process knowledge, and AI that knows how your business flows.

This connective tissue between you and your processes brings together real-time data, mining and analyzing for insights, planning and simulating improvements, and monitoring for adherence to those improvements. It provides a common language for understanding and improving how your business runs.

Process mining is the technology at the heart of the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform.