BMW’s process mining leader has called for more openness among suppliers of business applications and software to prevent data lock-in.
Process mining aims to extract data from application logs and other data sources to build models of how people execute processes, as opposed to how they are designed. There can be a big difference in complex, ever-changing organizations.
It is designed to help improve current processes, lay the foundation for process change and assist in the rollout of new business applications. For example, global pharmaceutical company GSK used Celonis software to discover that it had approximately 28,000 different variants for the process of fulfilling a sales order in preparation for an SAP unification project.
Car manufacturer BMW has been using Celonis since 2017. Other customers include German industrial giant Siemens, health and consumer products manufacturer Johnson & Johnson and PepsiCo.
Dr. Patrick Lechner, head of BMW’s process mining and robotic process automation, said if application and platform suppliers were more open it could help process mining.
“One area (for improvement) is that the software stack must be very open. At BMW we have many different software products and it is very important that we can really connect them together… both to get the data out and to analyze the data further,” he said The register.
“It’s very important that (to use) open platforms, they don’t have this strong lock-in and so they can’t connect to another system. This is really crucial to our success because we always want to use the best tool for the right target,” he added.
Yet the question remains whether large software platforms are open enough. Dr. Lechner said: “Several software companies are trying to expand their reach and their use, but this can’t be done by capturing users… and I think this is critical for us. It has to be done by adding features that benefit users.”
BMW was founded in 1916 as a manufacturer of aircraft engines. In addition to the global car and motorcycle brands, BMW owns the iconic British brands Mini and Rolls-Royce. It is one of the ten largest manufacturers in the sector worldwide, with sales of €155.5 billion ($166 billion) in 2023.
The company is in the middle of migrating older SAP ERP systems based on the ECC platform to S/4HANA in the cloud. In January last year, BMW announced that it had signed up for the RISE with SAP program, in which SAP joins forces with cloud providers, consultants and systems integrators to shake hands in an effort to transform applications and processes. BMW has already used the new platform at the MINI plant in Oxford, England, for parts logistics, finance and control.
BMW Group’s ECC system is said to contain more than 30 TB of data, ready to transition to the new platform.
But the migration from ECC to S/4HANA and the cloud is not just a software upgrade. It requires a rethinking of business processes, as users are expected to abandon the customizations they coded on the older platform and prefer a “clean core” ERP in S/4HANA, with configured add-ons in the cloud, although there is room for new coding in the ABAP cloud.
As part of the RISE with SAP package, the ERP vendor has been pushing customers to use the Signavio process mining technology, which it adopted in 2021. SAP said Signavio helps organizations “understand (their) existing processes and build a business case for migration… to discover potential benefits and improvements.”
Lechner said BMW was still assessing whether to use Signavio for the SAP transformation project, but he told us Celonis will likely be part of it.
“This is a very important topic – SAP transformation – and we are in discussions with colleagues to (find) the right tool. Tools have been built within SAP, but there is also transformation between different systems and not only within SAP… but also involving systems outside SAP. So it is not black and white. In the case of the SAP transformation, we are currently evaluating how best to use which tool, but we will also use Celonis for certain aspects of those projects,” says he. said.
While BWM’s SAP transformation may be one of the biggest technology topics internally, Lechner says there are broader business ambitions for process mining. For example, the auto giant is trying to understand how it interacts with customers because, like others in the industry, it deals with them more directly, rather than through dealers.
“That’s a big topic: we’re currently exploring the customer journey. BMW’s retail model is currently changing… We’re in the early stages, but we’ve seen some good ideas and some early good results,” he says. said. ®